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> What will it cost if the climate exceeds the Paris Agreement temperature goals this century—even if we later remove carbon dioxide from the air and manage to

> What will it cost if the climate exceeds the Paris Agreement temperature goals this century—even if we later remove carbon dioxide from the air and manage to bring temperatures back down to meet those targets by 2100? And how does that compare with the costs of staying below those targets? Those questions may be good ones for people who are concerned about climate change, but who is going to be persuaded to take action by the argument they induce? To be persuasive to consumers now, a cost comparison has to appeal to the consumer's hip pocket right now. More like one of these format: Are you paying too much for gas? Click to save 25% on your next tank. Save 47% on home heating costs this winter. Send your kids to college with the money you save over the lifetime of your next car. It's difficult to do in the context of the article but that's what's required to change behaviour. Well, it isn't the only thing that's required. What is also required is the alternative energy products to be available to consumers at attractive prices. How do we make that happen? As an ordinary person who pays for energy but isn't an energy scientist, I don't know. That's why I'm still spending $700 a month on fossil fuels. But give me a way and I'll click on it.

andreilys 5y ago
There’s also the moral hazard problem. Yes it’ll be more expensive to remove carbon dioxide from the air in the future but i will be dead by then, so why do I care? Also this moral hazard is made worst by decision makers whose financial outcomes are tied to not adopting extreme climate measures. Especially those without children, taking the long view of society seems to be very difficult.
- Biologist123 5y ago
  We know people are concerned about what happens to their families after they die as inheritance taxes are so unpopular!
  - actually_a_dog 5y ago
    Inheritance taxes only apply to rich people. So, at best, that tells you rich people care about what happens to their descendents. Do you have any evidence rich people care about the descendents of poor people?
    - math_denial 5y ago
      >Do you have any evidence rich people care about the descendents of poor people? No, but people care about their descendants, rich or poor.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - Biologist123 5y ago
      My answer is a response to the poster’s question as to why he might care. And I believe most people do care what happens to their descendants.
      - actually_a_dog 5y ago
        It doesn't matter if rich people care about their own descendents. Everybody knows rich people will be fine. Poor people have minimal capacity to do anything about the situation.
    - whywhywhywhy 5y ago
      No taxes ever apply to rich people. It’s only ever something that holds the working and middle class down.
- luckylion 5y ago
  > Especially those without children, taking the long view of society seems to be very difficult. Hey, that's me! But more importantly, I'm not super worried about it in general. I consider it mostly a number of engineering problems (making things more efficient, consuming less energy while doing the same, dealing with climate change). At the same time, I see plenty of people who say they're super concerned about it hopping from one plane to the next. When questioned, they say that talking about their individual contributions would just deflect from talking about "the system". If you want me to get behind those ideas (and that's a pretty easy sell, tbh, I'd barely have to change my lifestyle), you (not you specifically, I don't know you) need to act as if you mean it. So far it feels like the upper class saying the lower classes shouldn't travel, eat exotic food or meat, drive cars or heat their homes, while they obviously do all of those things. From my limited circle of friends, that's a pretty common perception, even among those with children.
  - drekk 5y ago
    Talking about indidivual contributions is pointless without context. The richest 1% of humanity emits more than double the amount of CO2 as the poorest half. Air travel could use alternative fuel sources (or even solar) and I'm sure other large carbon emitters like concrete will become more efficient. What I'm not sure is that the richest 1% of the globe are willing to live like everyone else to avoid cooking the planet and passing that cost onto everyone else. I travel by plane once or twice a year, haven't had meat in years, own a car with good fuel efficiency, heat my home with gas, and it still doesn't register on the scale. If you want me to live like an ascetic to convince you that I am serious about the runaway consequences of increased average surface temperatures I don't know what to tell you. We are already seeing those effects, and it is doubtful that Miami, Dhubai, etc exist at the end of this century. There is no way to adjust individual consumption fast enough to fully decarbonize industrial economies so as to avoid 2C+ increases. Hence the systems problem. Why is Australia and the US subsidizing fossil fuels? Who is served by firing up retired coalfire power plants to mine Bitcoin? That's only looking at CO2, forget about our other biosphere limits (nitrogen, phosphorus to name a few) that we're rapidly approaching the ceiling of. Optimizing for profit means you have an incentive to gain today with tomorrow as collateral. Until companies and governments feel the full financial and human cost of their carbon economies we'll continue to get Chevron advertising about how it's all of our responsibility to turn off the lights when not in use, and that will somehow "turn off" climate change.
- dennis_jeeves 5y ago
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>Well, it isn't the only thing that's required. What is also required is the alternative energy products to be available to consumers at attractive prices. And before any wise ass says the solution is "just" to tax dirty energy I would like to remind everyone to stop projecting stupidity and apathy onto the general public. A couple percent here and there to incentive things at the margin may fly but if their energy bills double they're not gonna just roll over and take it. At the next opportunity they'll vote you out of office because that is the more direct and more effective way of solving their immediate problem of financial hardship.
- drekk 5y ago
  You could just nationalize these inefficient plutocratic utilities and provide free renewable energy, but that's communism I don't know why the answer is always to make the serfs pay more when a more attractive and simple solution would be, I don't know, not having private jets and fossil fuel subsidies and ...
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    Even the kibbutzim had to introduce energy meters in their semi-utopian communities, because with no personal interest in keeping their bills low, some people would just waste communal energy. There isn't any personal incentive not to waste a free resource, save individual conscientiousness, which many people score low upon.
  - nradov 5y ago
    So what are you proposing exactly? Confiscate private aircraft? Force everyone to ride the bus?
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    > You could just nationalize these inefficient plutocratic utilities and provide free renewable energy, but that's communism This is a joke right? Using other people's money doesn't make it free. You have to pay for it with taxes. Whether it's government or private is mostly tangential to cost. It's not like municipalities with utility co-ops pay tons more or less. The differences seem to mostly be around what the accountability looks like when the utility inevitably screws up (Flint, PG&E, etc, etc).
zbrozek 5y ago
California (specifically the CPUC, as servant of the for-profit utilities here) is choosing to make electricity extremely expensive, which is making it short-term economically less favorable than it could be to switch. I have an EV, which makes sense economically especially because I can charge somewhere that power isn't produced or delivered by PG&E. But I burn gas to keep warm because my own home electricity is too expensive. Municipalities are removing residents' ability to choose by banning gas. I expect this will accelerate the failure of companies like PG&E (and the grid) by driving new construction to be off-grid. I've been inching my way there on my own home. Cars as storage batteries is inevitable and will be game changing. In about two years I will have an egregious excess of solar capacity. And hopefully no grid connection. I'd love to have a way to use that excess to suck carbon out of the air and ideally make a product I can use out of it. Pyrolitic graphite sheets would be fantastic, or liquid hydrocarbons I can burn in my legacy vehicles or a backup generator. But I would settle for something I can throw away and have buried in a landfill.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  If you’re going to have an excess of something valuable, why not sell it back to the grid?
  - zbrozek 5y ago
    Because it isn't valuable. Around here you get paid approximately nothing to put power into the grid. The asymmetry is comically large.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      Sure, but you seem willing to instead get something high in carbon that’s economically valueless and pay to bury it in the ground. That seems unlikely to be more carbon-efficient than curtailing someone else’s use of the fuel of last resort.
      - zbrozek 5y ago
        Right, but I'm not trying to optimize carbon efficiency. And neither are the regulators. If they were trying to reduce GHG emissions, they'd keep the nuclear plants operational, try to drive down the price of electricity relative to everything else, and have better pricing to feed in to the grid. As it is, the cheapest way for me to get electricity is to buy a turbine generator and burn natural gas myself. Which is completely insane.
ianai 5y ago
Would you be willing to pay to offset your carbon usage sans the market pricing it into the price of goods and services you already consumed? Right now, there's no reason to suspect the market creators of the world WILL nor CAN force carbon offsets into market prices. I'm not even sure what you're asking for here.
bko 5y ago
There are options to reduce your carbon footprint but from my experience they've been captured by sleazy companies with deceptive practices. I get a letter regularly telling me to switch my energy to green by signing up for this service where I'll pay more. But if you read the fine print you're not actually switching to green energy. You're paying more for the same energy and they're taking the money and doing something with it that is maybe green? Giving it to green companies? I don't know but it's not what I immediately thought when I saw the main claim. Same is true with solar panels where they finance it through a senior lien on your property while all the calculations of savings are based on current subsidy levels. And they're budening people with senior debt that can prevent them from selling their home in the future without paying off the senior claim or passing it on. You even see it with EV cars where the listed price includes cost savings from gas. It's just dishonest. You don't see that math on fuel efficient cars.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  If a homeowner has an existing mortgage (as most do), I doubt the solar companies are getting a senior lien on the property. (How could they without the consent of the existing senior lien holder?)
  - bko 5y ago
    Exactly what I'm talking about. Most people don't know this and get duped into thinking the solar panels are a personal loan. > Lender Notification and Consent: Existing property lenders must receive notification and give approval for C-PACE financing in most states. This is important because C-PACE loans displace other liens. Normally, R-PACE loans don’t require consent from the mortgage lender. [0] > One of the biggest risks of the PACE program is the risk for foreclosure. The contract for the funding will act as a lien on the property. If you fall behind on your payments, you risk losing their home or business to foreclosure. Even if you're current on your mortgage payments, the PACE program moves in front of it, and they can start foreclosure proceedings. [1] [0] https://assetsamerica.com/pace-financing/ https://assetsamerica.com/pace-financing/ [1] https://www.mortgagecalculator.org/helpful-advice/pace-program.php https://www.mortgagecalculator.org/helpful-advice/pace-progr...
nsv 5y ago
Just curious, what does that $700 buy exactly? My power bill and gas for my car combined never exceed $200. I assume it's a cost of living difference?
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Not GP, but in a cold winter month in New England, I can easily be over $700 for combined electric and natural gas (not all of which is fossil fuel, of course; some is distribution, taxes, salaries of workers, capital recovery, etc). It’s a 1920s structural brick house with limited insulation, 1950s boiler converted to gas. My year-round average is just under $500/mo for the house and around $80/mo for our 25mpg Honda CR-V (other car is a LEAF). Retrofitting the house to modern insulation is not remotely cost-effective. (We’ve already done the low-hanging fruit.) Modern boiler conversion is on the schedule for next summer, but driven in large part by wanting to reclaim space in the basement. Economically, that project probably won’t pay for itself either (absent the value of the space reclaimed). Buying a 40 mpg car to replace our perfectly functional 25 mpg 2005 CR-V to save $30/mo in fuel is economically nonsensical as well. Fossil fuels are incredibly cheap and their cheapness makes them attractive to continue burning. As long as they stay cheap, people will continue to extract the surplus value from them.

andreilys 5y ago

There’s also the moral hazard problem. Yes it’ll be more expensive to remove carbon dioxide from the air in the future but i will be dead by then, so why do I care? Also this moral hazard is made worst by decision makers whose financial outcomes are tied to not adopting extreme climate measures. Especially those without children, taking the long view of society seems to be very difficult.

Biologist123 5y ago
We know people are concerned about what happens to their families after they die as inheritance taxes are so unpopular!
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  Inheritance taxes only apply to rich people. So, at best, that tells you rich people care about what happens to their descendents. Do you have any evidence rich people care about the descendents of poor people?
  - math_denial 5y ago
    >Do you have any evidence rich people care about the descendents of poor people? No, but people care about their descendants, rich or poor.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - Biologist123 5y ago
    My answer is a response to the poster’s question as to why he might care. And I believe most people do care what happens to their descendants.
    - actually_a_dog 5y ago
      It doesn't matter if rich people care about their own descendents. Everybody knows rich people will be fine. Poor people have minimal capacity to do anything about the situation.
  - whywhywhywhy 5y ago
    No taxes ever apply to rich people. It’s only ever something that holds the working and middle class down.
luckylion 5y ago
> Especially those without children, taking the long view of society seems to be very difficult. Hey, that's me! But more importantly, I'm not super worried about it in general. I consider it mostly a number of engineering problems (making things more efficient, consuming less energy while doing the same, dealing with climate change). At the same time, I see plenty of people who say they're super concerned about it hopping from one plane to the next. When questioned, they say that talking about their individual contributions would just deflect from talking about "the system". If you want me to get behind those ideas (and that's a pretty easy sell, tbh, I'd barely have to change my lifestyle), you (not you specifically, I don't know you) need to act as if you mean it. So far it feels like the upper class saying the lower classes shouldn't travel, eat exotic food or meat, drive cars or heat their homes, while they obviously do all of those things. From my limited circle of friends, that's a pretty common perception, even among those with children.
- drekk 5y ago
  Talking about indidivual contributions is pointless without context. The richest 1% of humanity emits more than double the amount of CO2 as the poorest half. Air travel could use alternative fuel sources (or even solar) and I'm sure other large carbon emitters like concrete will become more efficient. What I'm not sure is that the richest 1% of the globe are willing to live like everyone else to avoid cooking the planet and passing that cost onto everyone else. I travel by plane once or twice a year, haven't had meat in years, own a car with good fuel efficiency, heat my home with gas, and it still doesn't register on the scale. If you want me to live like an ascetic to convince you that I am serious about the runaway consequences of increased average surface temperatures I don't know what to tell you. We are already seeing those effects, and it is doubtful that Miami, Dhubai, etc exist at the end of this century. There is no way to adjust individual consumption fast enough to fully decarbonize industrial economies so as to avoid 2C+ increases. Hence the systems problem. Why is Australia and the US subsidizing fossil fuels? Who is served by firing up retired coalfire power plants to mine Bitcoin? That's only looking at CO2, forget about our other biosphere limits (nitrogen, phosphorus to name a few) that we're rapidly approaching the ceiling of. Optimizing for profit means you have an incentive to gain today with tomorrow as collateral. Until companies and governments feel the full financial and human cost of their carbon economies we'll continue to get Chevron advertising about how it's all of our responsibility to turn off the lights when not in use, and that will somehow "turn off" climate change.
dennis_jeeves 5y ago

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

>Well, it isn't the only thing that's required. What is also required is the alternative energy products to be available to consumers at attractive prices. And before any wise ass says the solution is "just" to tax dirty energy I would like to remind everyone to stop projecting stupidity and apathy onto the general public. A couple percent here and there to incentive things at the margin may fly but if their energy bills double they're not gonna just roll over and take it. At the next opportunity they'll vote you out of office because that is the more direct and more effective way of solving their immediate problem of financial hardship.

drekk 5y ago
You could just nationalize these inefficient plutocratic utilities and provide free renewable energy, but that's communism I don't know why the answer is always to make the serfs pay more when a more attractive and simple solution would be, I don't know, not having private jets and fossil fuel subsidies and ...
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Even the kibbutzim had to introduce energy meters in their semi-utopian communities, because with no personal interest in keeping their bills low, some people would just waste communal energy. There isn't any personal incentive not to waste a free resource, save individual conscientiousness, which many people score low upon.
- nradov 5y ago
  So what are you proposing exactly? Confiscate private aircraft? Force everyone to ride the bus?
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  > You could just nationalize these inefficient plutocratic utilities and provide free renewable energy, but that's communism This is a joke right? Using other people's money doesn't make it free. You have to pay for it with taxes. Whether it's government or private is mostly tangential to cost. It's not like municipalities with utility co-ops pay tons more or less. The differences seem to mostly be around what the accountability looks like when the utility inevitably screws up (Flint, PG&E, etc, etc).

zbrozek 5y ago

California (specifically the CPUC, as servant of the for-profit utilities here) is choosing to make electricity extremely expensive, which is making it short-term economically less favorable than it could be to switch. I have an EV, which makes sense economically especially because I can charge somewhere that power isn't produced or delivered by PG&E. But I burn gas to keep warm because my own home electricity is too expensive. Municipalities are removing residents' ability to choose by banning gas. I expect this will accelerate the failure of companies like PG&E (and the grid) by driving new construction to be off-grid. I've been inching my way there on my own home. Cars as storage batteries is inevitable and will be game changing. In about two years I will have an egregious excess of solar capacity. And hopefully no grid connection. I'd love to have a way to use that excess to suck carbon out of the air and ideally make a product I can use out of it. Pyrolitic graphite sheets would be fantastic, or liquid hydrocarbons I can burn in my legacy vehicles or a backup generator. But I would settle for something I can throw away and have buried in a landfill.

sokoloff 5y ago
If you’re going to have an excess of something valuable, why not sell it back to the grid?
- zbrozek 5y ago
  Because it isn't valuable. Around here you get paid approximately nothing to put power into the grid. The asymmetry is comically large.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Sure, but you seem willing to instead get something high in carbon that’s economically valueless and pay to bury it in the ground. That seems unlikely to be more carbon-efficient than curtailing someone else’s use of the fuel of last resort.
    - zbrozek 5y ago
      Right, but I'm not trying to optimize carbon efficiency. And neither are the regulators. If they were trying to reduce GHG emissions, they'd keep the nuclear plants operational, try to drive down the price of electricity relative to everything else, and have better pricing to feed in to the grid. As it is, the cheapest way for me to get electricity is to buy a turbine generator and burn natural gas myself. Which is completely insane.

ianai 5y ago

Would you be willing to pay to offset your carbon usage sans the market pricing it into the price of goods and services you already consumed? Right now, there's no reason to suspect the market creators of the world WILL nor CAN force carbon offsets into market prices. I'm not even sure what you're asking for here.

bko 5y ago

There are options to reduce your carbon footprint but from my experience they've been captured by sleazy companies with deceptive practices. I get a letter regularly telling me to switch my energy to green by signing up for this service where I'll pay more. But if you read the fine print you're not actually switching to green energy. You're paying more for the same energy and they're taking the money and doing something with it that is maybe green? Giving it to green companies? I don't know but it's not what I immediately thought when I saw the main claim. Same is true with solar panels where they finance it through a senior lien on your property while all the calculations of savings are based on current subsidy levels. And they're budening people with senior debt that can prevent them from selling their home in the future without paying off the senior claim or passing it on. You even see it with EV cars where the listed price includes cost savings from gas. It's just dishonest. You don't see that math on fuel efficient cars.

sokoloff 5y ago
If a homeowner has an existing mortgage (as most do), I doubt the solar companies are getting a senior lien on the property. (How could they without the consent of the existing senior lien holder?)
- bko 5y ago
  Exactly what I'm talking about. Most people don't know this and get duped into thinking the solar panels are a personal loan. > Lender Notification and Consent: Existing property lenders must receive notification and give approval for C-PACE financing in most states. This is important because C-PACE loans displace other liens. Normally, R-PACE loans don’t require consent from the mortgage lender. [0] > One of the biggest risks of the PACE program is the risk for foreclosure. The contract for the funding will act as a lien on the property. If you fall behind on your payments, you risk losing their home or business to foreclosure. Even if you're current on your mortgage payments, the PACE program moves in front of it, and they can start foreclosure proceedings. [1] [0] https://assetsamerica.com/pace-financing/ https://assetsamerica.com/pace-financing/ [1] https://www.mortgagecalculator.org/helpful-advice/pace-program.php https://www.mortgagecalculator.org/helpful-advice/pace-progr...

nsv 5y ago

Just curious, what does that $700 buy exactly? My power bill and gas for my car combined never exceed $200. I assume it's a cost of living difference?

sokoloff 5y ago
Not GP, but in a cold winter month in New England, I can easily be over $700 for combined electric and natural gas (not all of which is fossil fuel, of course; some is distribution, taxes, salaries of workers, capital recovery, etc). It’s a 1920s structural brick house with limited insulation, 1950s boiler converted to gas. My year-round average is just under $500/mo for the house and around $80/mo for our 25mpg Honda CR-V (other car is a LEAF). Retrofitting the house to modern insulation is not remotely cost-effective. (We’ve already done the low-hanging fruit.) Modern boiler conversion is on the schedule for next summer, but driven in large part by wanting to reclaim space in the basement. Economically, that project probably won’t pay for itself either (absent the value of the space reclaimed). Buying a 40 mpg car to replace our perfectly functional 25 mpg 2005 CR-V to save $30/mo in fuel is economically nonsensical as well. Fossil fuels are incredibly cheap and their cheapness makes them attractive to continue burning. As long as they stay cheap, people will continue to extract the surplus value from them.