[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.