[bsder]

> Would that incentivize people?

No, because, much like the "water crisis" in California, individuals didn't make the direct choices the led to the crisis. Shipping your food from half a world away was not a direct choice any consumer made. Making your clothing half a world away was not a direct choice any consumer made. Building all infrastructure around cars was not a direct choice any consumer made.

If you want to reduce CO2, you have to do something to bake it's price into wherever it is being used or created.

(The "water crisis" in California is actually an "agribusiness water crisis"--if every individual in California quit using water for drinking, showers, lawn watering, swimming pools, etc., the Central Valley agribusinesses would still be unable to irrigate without pumping out the aquifers. The only solution to the California "water crisis" is to shut down the agribusinesses and make them move to somewhere with water. We are actually seeing this with desalinization in California--desalinization can actually supply almost all the people but isn't going to do anything for businesses.)

[edejong]

Short answer, because I really have to get some sleep.

You assume people are incentivized by price, but people are incentivized by status. That's why they buy fake Rolexes and put themselves in extreme debt.

Connect CO_2 emissions with status.

[bsder]

I guess I wasn't very clear.

The problem is that if an individual makes every single choice they can to reduce their CO2 footprint, they still won't make a dent in CO2 emissions. It's effectively pissing in the ocean.

So, you can connect it to status and make people feel good, but you have to go after the big things if you want to actually dent CO2 emissions (this is simply a case of Amdahl's law in reverse).

And the big one is transportation. If you can get every single car and truck onto electricity, you win multiple times. Traffic jams don't convert energy to CO2; electric motors are quite a bit more efficient than internal combustion engines at low speeds with high torque; multiple distributed CO2 sources now become single point sources (at the power plant--much easier to apply technology to).

After that, the next big thing, if I remember correctly, is that you need to switch from AC transmission lines to high-voltage DC transmission lines as the loss is so much better. And a LOT of energy gets lost to simple transmission (also has the advantage that your grids are much easier to interconnect and stabilize).

After those two, then you take a look around and see what the next big 2 or 3 are, and go attack those. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Until you are at CO2 negative.

[siphon22]

Wouldn't it be the sorry saps who buy real Rolexes putting themselves in debt? The guys buying fake ones are the smart ones, getting status without paying the full price.

[edejong]

I was attempting to make the point that status and money are only partly connected.