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Climate scientists have long been calculating a remaining CO2 budget (that would prevent the worst from happening if humanity didn't go over). This gives rate o

by ephbit 5y ago

Climate scientists have long been calculating a remaining CO2 budget (that would prevent the worst from happening if humanity didn't go over). This gives rate of CO2 emissions as kg/s. Economists surely can come up with some number of USD to be paid for the emission of 1 kg CO2 (by looking at some economic reference numbers) that will effectively render 10,20,...,90%,99% of all different uses of CO2 emitting processes unprofitable or economically infeasible.

joe_the_user 5y ago
Sure, you could raise prices so much that nearly every of use CO2-emitting processes wouldn't be possible. But that might result in, say, people not being able to afford to heat their houses in the winter in cold areas of the US. I am all for alternative energy but I don't think this is an approach that would work.
- ephbit 5y ago
  This is yet another one of these problems that repeatedly remind me of what I call continuous politics: Scenario: A painful (unpopular with citizens/businesses) political decision needs to be made that imposes a (often times financial) burden on people/businesses. Option A is to just push past political resistance and apply the burden (tax, regulation, ...) at once. This results in a minor/major shock to the involved systems. And it might lower acceptance of the politicians who decided it. Option B would be to - instead of practically imposing a brutal unit step function as in A - implement a differentiable function to "go from 0 to 1". I call this continuous politics. A physical analogy would be slowing a high velocity vehicle down to a halt because there's an insurmountable obstacle in its way. The least painful way is to simply reduce the velocity in a linear fashion. There are of course many other variants besides a linear approach. There are probably situations for which degressive or progressive functions are better. But the linear function is easy to implement and understand and people and businesses could plan for the future, if the numbers were laid out to them early. Businesses are probably better than people, though. Because they are probably less susceptible to the frog-in-slowly-heating-water effect. > I am all for alternative energy but I don't think this is an approach that would work. I think - if implemented linearly - this approach would be the least painful. All the other "approaches" will very likely effectively carry out like shocks/catastrophes with dramatically more harm done.

by ephbit 5y ago

joe_the_user 5y ago

Sure, you could raise prices so much that nearly every of use CO2-emitting processes wouldn't be possible. But that might result in, say, people not being able to afford to heat their houses in the winter in cold areas of the US. I am all for alternative energy but I don't think this is an approach that would work.

ephbit 5y ago
This is yet another one of these problems that repeatedly remind me of what I call continuous politics: Scenario: A painful (unpopular with citizens/businesses) political decision needs to be made that imposes a (often times financial) burden on people/businesses. Option A is to just push past political resistance and apply the burden (tax, regulation, ...) at once. This results in a minor/major shock to the involved systems. And it might lower acceptance of the politicians who decided it. Option B would be to - instead of practically imposing a brutal unit step function as in A - implement a differentiable function to "go from 0 to 1". I call this continuous politics. A physical analogy would be slowing a high velocity vehicle down to a halt because there's an insurmountable obstacle in its way. The least painful way is to simply reduce the velocity in a linear fashion. There are of course many other variants besides a linear approach. There are probably situations for which degressive or progressive functions are better. But the linear function is easy to implement and understand and people and businesses could plan for the future, if the numbers were laid out to them early. Businesses are probably better than people, though. Because they are probably less susceptible to the frog-in-slowly-heating-water effect. > I am all for alternative energy but I don't think this is an approach that would work. I think - if implemented linearly - this approach would be the least painful. All the other "approaches" will very likely effectively carry out like shocks/catastrophes with dramatically more harm done.