[peacetreefrog]

We need a carbon tax stat IMO. Economist John Cochrane had a good blog post about this recently (I actually posted to HN a few days ago but it got buried):

https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2019/05/ip-on-carbon-tax....

From the end:

"Climate policy was headed to this kind of bipartisan technocratic resolution in the 1990s before it became a tool of partisan warfare. The challenge, from both sides, is to remove the political baggage that climate policy has accumulated."

He then makes that appeal to both sides:

"To my climate-skeptic friends: Given that the government is going to regulate carbon, this is the way to do it with least damage. To my green-warrior friends, if the government is actually going to reduce carbon, not just subsidize cronies and engage in worthless value-signaling gestures, a trade of carbon taxes for absurdly costly regulations and subsidies is the only way to get anywhere."

[mieseratte]

> To my climate-skeptic friends: Given that the government is going to regulate carbon, this is the way to do it with least damage.

First, that starts off with a false premise. You don't know that the government is going to regulate carbon.

Second, ignoring the "climate change is a myth" crowd, there are those that believe that we are, at this point, past the point of helping and that we might as well just get on with it and adapt to whatever changes await. That attempts at regulation will just destroy the economy, and thus their place in it, and that ruining the economy and thus untold (b|m)illions of lives that way is not worth the unknown outcome of attempting to save the current state of climate.

This isn't even a "not my problem" situation. I've heard this from folks leaving in a coastal region that already suffers some amount of regular nuisance flooding. It's not as if rising tides will skip over them.

Failing to understand that viewpoint is going to result in two sides yelling past each other. One side thinks we must do everything in our power to preserve nature's status-quo, the other is firmly of the mind that it is an impossibility and to try would be wasted effort with much risk and unclear gain.

Your first task is convincing them of the horrors that await for them.

[esotericn]

> there are those that believe that we are, at this point, past the point of helping and that we might as well just get on with it and adapt to whatever changes await

Pricing in externalities is a part of that adaptation. It literally is "getting on with it".

It's unclear to me what you mean by this.

If your farm is on fire, maybe you lose a room. OK, so you adapt. Perhaps you'll never earn enough again to rebuild it properly. You might be a bit traumatised - maybe you buy more smoke alarms, cameras, sprinklers, stuff like that.

What you don't do is set the whole thing alight, burn it to hell, and adapt to the changes having contributed to your life savings going up in smoke.

If a family member or close friend dies - you hang out with friends, you go to therapy. You certainly don't buy some weapons and decide to finish off the rest of your friends for good measure!

A climate that continuously changes by a few degrees every decade is going to be impossible to adapt to properly. We will effectively never be able to build permanent structures again.

What's the goal here? 800ppm? 1200? Literally just whack the thermostat up 10c and have every city in the world suddenly be in the wrong place?

> attempts at regulation will just destroy the economy, and thus their place in it, and that ruining the economy and thus untold (b|m)illions of lives that way

It's unclear to me why pricing in externalities would do this.

Shifting consumption to more efficient "happiness/usefulness per damage" stuff wouldn't ruin anything.

It's difficult for me to understand why people would think that carbon pricing pushing people towards different foods or smaller cars or cycling or whatever would "destroy the economy". I think they have a different definition of the word 'destroy'. Consuming a bit less is not destruction. Your hometown being underwater is a destroyed economy.

[malvosenior]

> A climate that continuously changes by a few degrees every decade is going to be impossible to adapt to properly. We will effectively never be able to build permanent structures again.

Why would we not be able to build permanent structures?

[avisser]

Because, eventually, the place they were built would become uninhabitable for humans.

[malvosenior]

Even the most aggressive global warming estimates are no where near making the entire earth’s surface uninhabitable to humans.

[Izkata]

> Pricing in externalities is a part of that adaptation. It literally is "getting on with it".

> It's unclear to me what you mean by this.

I thought it was very clear:

> If your farm is on fire, maybe you lose a room. OK, so you adapt. Perhaps you'll never earn enough again to rebuild it properly. You might be a bit traumatised - maybe you buy more smoke alarms, cameras, sprinklers, stuff like that.

> What you don't do is set the whole thing alight, burn it to hell, and adapt to the changes having contributed to your life savings going up in smoke.

They're arguing against something like fining the person whose farm caught on fire.

Arguing for pricing in externalities is more akin to arguing for the fine, trying to make people change their ways so such fires are less common, while giving no thought to the people affected directly (unnecessary extra costs on top of recovering from the fire), or who couldn't avoid it (lightning strike causing fire / infrastructure not in place to avoid the cost and it getting passed to the consumer instead of dealt with).

[esotericn]

The whole issue here is in thinking about pricing carbon as a "fine".

It represents fixing the economic incentives.

If a beef burger is 10x more environmentally damaging than a vegetable one, it should cost approximately ten times more.

As I've posted below - this is child-level logic. It's time for us to sort our shit out. There really is no option.

We need stable homes, nutrition, and a bit of entertainment. We don't need no-holds-barred competition to literally use as much of everything as we possibly can; and we _certainly_ don't need that to be apportioned essentially randomly - the more damaging activities should cost more.

If it bothers you to be confronted by that - if your first thoughts are "economic damage" and the fact your life might slightly change - I'm sorry for you. Because you really are fucked, you're coming down with all of us.

[indemnity]

You’re not using effective arguments that will change someone’s point of view.

I believe climate change is coming but trying to convince someone they should change because they are a Bad Person if they don’t change their ways, or that some unspecified type of fuckedness is looming, is not very successful.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01103v1.pdf

[esotericn]

When the carbon tax happens they won't have a choice.

Or it won't and we die in a fire.

So it goes.

I don't aim to convince anyone; just stating how it is. I think most are beyond saving.

[mieseratte]

> Pricing in externalities is a part of that adaptation. It literally is "getting on with it".

> It's unclear to me why pricing in externalities would do this.

Well I'm not here try to tell you they will, and why. I'm telling you why you run into intelligent people who aren't gung-ho about reforming our economy in regards to climate change. That if you're trying to have a conversation with to get the desired result, politics, how you need to approach the "other" side.

Of those that I've talked to about this, the belief is that the necessary changes to pricing would result in an economic downturn, as bad as if not worse than the "Great Recession," which is still in recent memory for just about every adult. That's the milder hesitancy, some believe the necessary economic changes simply aren't possible, that to do so wouldn't even help make things better. That we're past the point of no return, so might as well just roll with it and adapt as needed.

Your problem is not telling them "bad things are going to happen if we don't deal with emissions" but rather "things are going to be so bad that your fear of economic decline is the lesser of two evils." Secondary is convincing them that necessary pricing can be put into place without destroying the economy.

[atq2119]

We need to emphasize the message that massive amounts of infrastructure must be built both to limit and to adapt to climate change.

That's literally the opposite of damaging the economy. If we actually took climate change seriously as a challenge to civilization itself, we'd have a boom economy like it hasn't been seen in at least 50 years.

[qarlow]

That is sort of the problem though. Climate change arguably wouldn't have been much of a challenge for western countries if we had continued to evolve our cities, infrastructure and applicable technologies. Instead our economies are mostly paper based so we can't make real world changes without affecting someone's contract, mortgage or stock value. Therefor we are left changing our papers around, which of course upsets anyone who need the improvements.

[FrojoS]

> are those that believe that we are, at this point, past the point of helping and that we might as well just get on with it and adapt to whatever changes await.

This makes no sense at all. Climate change is not a binary effect, it's compounding.

[dmm]

> there are those that believe that we are, at this point, past the point of helping and that we might as well just get on with it and adapt

Climate change is inevitable but the amount of change can still be affected. Preventing carbon emissions now will absolutely be cheaper that paying for mitigations in the future.

The amount of warming is very important. An increase from 1.5C to 2.0C will kill an additional 100 million people from air pollution alone.

[bryanlarsen]

To the second: even if stopping climate change is impossible, slowing it is tremendously valuable.

[chr1]

If you want to better understand the argument take a look at Bjorn Lomborg's talks https://www.lomborg.com, basically the argument is that even the strictest regulations are going to have a very small effect on the climate in 100 years, and for every dollar spent now we save merely cents in the future. So instead of implementing economically non-profitable measures, it is better to invest much more into research, and into helping poor countries, which will allow us to find better technologies to fight with climate change.

I am not sure what i think about this argument yet, but it seems like it may be reasonable.

[bryanlarsen]

Yet Bjorn Lomborg is pro carbon tax.

[chr1]

There are many different ways to implement carbon tax.

His proposal to replace other regulations with a small and uniform carbon tax, is bound to make both proponents and opponents of carbon tax unhappy (which may be a sign that it is a reasonable proposal:)

https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-comm...

[Filligree]

A carbon tax doesn't imply spending money, only moving it and changing the incentives. Money is only spent once it pays for some limited resource, whether that's human time or a truckload of ore.

[gregknicholson]

> technologies to fight with climate change

Climate change isn't a technical problem; it's a social problem.

“Advanced” economies rely on otherwise-unnecessary consumption of resources, irrespective of environmental damage, because there's no effective social penalty for harming the environment.

Clean energy won't help: demand always increases at least as fast as supply.

[chr1]

There is a social penalty. If you try to burn garbage in your yard your neighbours will not allow it. But the price cannot be larger than life, so when it is freezing outside and there is nothing else to burn, they won't mind the smoke, and will come to the warmth of fire instead.

Even if we stopped all unnecessary consumption, and kept only the minimum necessary for life, we would not make significant impact on climate change, because with the current number of people CO2 will still accumulate, and would become problem some time later.

If energy is clean, it simply will not cause global warming, independently of demand, but we do not even need to make it clean, we simply need to use the CO2 (e.g. by creating forests in deserts) or to use some other technology to gain fine grained control over the climate.

[peacetreefrog]

The government is already is regulating carbon. California has a cap and trade program, for example, and this court case in 2007 forced the EPA "to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) as pollutants."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_v._Environmental...

[rtkwe]

Very little has actually come out of that '07 case though. There were the Paris Climate Accords but those and the clean energy plan designed to actually achieve them were immediately ripped up so as much as they're legally required to there's not actually much being done at the EPA that isn't rolling back regulations.

[zajio1am]

I agree that we need a carbon tax. IMHO the good way to get wider support for it is to make it revenue-neutral - collected money could be distributed equally as income tax credit (or some other way).

In this way carbon tax would increas marginal costs of using carbon-intensive products, but does not increase overall taxation.

[WanderPanda]

I would rather like a carbon market where every person gets the same amount of emissions per year and can then sell this towards manufacturers using fossil carbon. This gets the notion of "the air we breath belongs to all of us" way better than shoveling even more money to the government

[peacetreefrog]

The problem with that is there are a lot of transaction costs to individuals selling their personal emissions.

Like the comment one higher up mentioned, one way to get around that and do effectively the same thing would be to split the revenue among citizens. This is what a bunch of economists have called for doing: https://www.econstatement.org/

[saeranv]

Trudeau has done this in Canada. I, like you, thought it would be a brilliant way to get around the traditional conservative opposition to taxes, but surprisingly - they still opposed it, and provincial conservatives have challenged it in the courts.

[graeme]

That said, revenue neutrality probably has increased the tax's popularity. Polls show a massive increase in approval when people are informed of this return of money.

[saeranv]

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that this is not something that "both sides" are equally responsible for. In Canada/US, conservatives/Republicans generally refuse to implement a carbon tax; whereas the center-left and left parties generally do. Additionally in the US, the Republicans don't even believe in climate-change.

Hence Chomsky's argument that the Republican party is the most dangerous organisation in human history: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/noam-choms...

So I agree we need carbon tax, but I find it frustrating to pretend this is a issue both sides are at fault for.

[peacetreefrog]

Well, depends what you mean by "at fault". I agree it's better to believe in global warming than deny it exists, but I agree with Cochrane that many of the attempts at at fixing it so far are basically "worthless value-signaling gestures".

Cochrane thinks (not sure I agree with him) that the onus right now is more on the traditional left than the right.

"...climate policy advocates have gone far beyond a technocratic idea of simply, well, reducing carbon. 'And nuclear energy' is usually noticeably absent. Carbon capture technologies, equally good at reducing carbon are usually noticeably absent. Other agendas like 'climate justice' creep in -- worthy or not, anything else that creeps in means less carbon reduction per dollar. A carbon tax reduces carbon any way that reduces carbon, which is really good at, well, reducing carbon, and not getting distracted with other agendas. That is a strong reason why carbon taxes, and especially such taxes in return for less regulation are resisted on the left."

Whether you agree re: who is at fault, given that most people on HN are prob on the "do something about climate change" end of the spectrum, if you are personally skeptical of a carbon tax vs something like the green new deal or Jay Inslee's climate change plan, I'd encourage you to look into it more.

Cochrane's blog post and and also this would be good places to start:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/17/this-is-n...

[olivermarks]

'it's better to believe in global warming than deny it exists' - this sums up the belief system aspects of the current hysteria. Cynics say the commercial goal of claims human pollution is super heating earth's atmosphere (which may be true) is to extract taxation from everyone on C02 use. Good stewardship of the planet is clearly in everyone's best interests but falling into the clutches of avaricious ecocapitalists who tax you on everything is only going to empty your wallet and restrict your movements, while probably not solving any environmental concerns.

[crazygringo]

This feels like such a straw man.

First, people on the left who are resisting carbon taxes are mostly because they believe cap and trade is a better solution, which many economists agree with.

Second, what has some notion of "climate justice" got to do with anything? I don't see any evidence politicians on the left are somehow getting distracted by "value-signaling".

Third, where does the idea come from that a carbon tax must be matched with less regulation elsewhere? That's a pure right-wing dream to try to match the two together, there is no connection.

What this essentially sounds like is a Republican talking point that it's all Democrats' fault because Democrats aren't succeeding, despite Republicans refusing to help and therefore making it impossible to succeed. The doublespeak and hypocrisy makes your head spin...

[peacetreefrog]

I don't think it's a straw man. Look at the two examples I cited.

This is the first thing that comes up when you google 'green new deal':

"A Green New Deal is a big, bold transformation of the economy to tackle the twin crises of inequality and climate change. It would mobilize vast public resources to help us transition from an economy built on exploitation and fossil fuels to one driven by dignified work and clean energy."

https://www.sierraclub.org/trade/what-green-new-deal

And here's AOC's chief of staff on the green new deal: "“Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti continued. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” "

Second is Jay Inslee, the democratic running for president who has made fighting climate change the centerpiece of his campaign.

https://www.jayinslee.com/climate-mission

Look at his four points. Point three is "fighting for environmental justice & economic inclusion". Two of the other points are subsidies, one for clean energy, the other for a jobs program. The last one -- getting rid of subsidies for fossil fuel industries -- is a good idea. Control f'ing for the word tax (as in carbon tax) gives no results. Neither does cap, nor trade.

[radicalbyte]

I would have agreed with you twenty years ago: back then implementing a global tax of $10 per ton on CO2 and increasing it to $100 per ton over a 20 year period would have been an excellent and extremely cheap solution.

Only I assumed that the "dirty" lobby killed that.

We're now at the point where if we want to keep a similar quality of life without destroying the planet something like the Green New Deal is going to be needed. Not necessarily from a technical standpoint but from a political one - such as change drastically improve the situation for a lot of people and will greatly decrease the risk of amoral fanatics winning again in the biggest economy in the world.

[rayiner]

The Democrats are willing to make slight changes, but at the end of the day, Americans are pumping 15-20 gigs tons per year of CO2 into the atmosphere and that number wouldn’t change under either Democrat or Republican policies. (Indeed, its not clear that when you account for Democrats’ opposition to nuclear power, which set of policies would’ve led to lower CO2 output in a counterfactual scenario.) And to keep warming to 1.5C, that number needs to go to zero this decade, then negative shortly after that. Also, this needs to happen in china and India, not just the US.

Note that measures to actually address climate change are unpopular even among Democrats. Sure, they like it when it’s articulated as a jobs program (“green new deal”) but they still oppose things like carbon taxes, which experts have offered forth as the solution. State level measures along those lines got strong push back in very blue and very environmentally conscious Oregon and Washington

[Bendingo]

> pretend this is a issue both sides are at fault for

I'm sorry but there is no doubt that "both sides are at fault".

"Trudeau has never really stood in the way of Canada’s oil industry, despite years of platitudes about addressing climate change."

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Trudeau-Declares-...

[saeranv]

He's not great, but I'm disagreeing with the false equivlance here. Trudeau is better compared to Harper who gagged scientists, compared to Scheer who wants to rely on subsidies and regulations to limit carbon, compared to Doug Ford and his ideaological opposition to carbon tax. So yes, Liberals are better then the Conservatives on the issue of the oil industry and reducing carbon emissions.

ETA: In an ideal world I'd prefer NDP or Green, but as long as we're limited by first past the post, the best way to support climate change mitigation is by avoiding Conservatives via the Liberals.

[perfunctory]

> We need a carbon tax stat IMO.

Good idea. How do we make it happen?

[bryanlarsen]

Having the top voted comment on a popular HN thread is a start. As you yourself mentioned, this kind of change requires change at the grass roots.

[dennisgorelik]

Tax increase makes people poorer. Poverty kills people.

Most likely effect of carbon tax is that it will kill more people than it will save.

[psychometry]

This is some South Park Chewbacca defense-level logic.

[bryanlarsen]

Taxes move money, they don't destroy it. They make some people richer and some poorer. A carbon tax and dividend scheme (advocated by economists) gives poor people a significant amount of money. The Green New Deal (advocated by left wing democrats) gives poor people a significant amount of money.

[dennisgorelik]

Overhead from distributing taxes -- makes people poorer on average.

I see how some taxes (such as gasoline tax for building roads) can have outsized advantages that are bigger than the tax distribution overhead. But carbon tax does NOT have advantages like that. At least not yet, considering that too much of the Earth land is too cold.