[hedora]

In the SF area, the redwoods are dying off from heat/drought. The pines and oaks are being hit with disease. On balance, the oaks seem to be replacing the redwood forests, but everything is thinning out.

The mountain forests in Southern California (near Yosemite, etc) have been burnt out hellscapes for years.

Of course, this is all rounding error vs. the loss of 90% of the kelp forest, which many people didn't notice, since it's underwater. The kelp biomass the has been lost in the last few years is equal to 100% of the redwood forests.

As I like to shout from the rooftops, gasoline could be made carbon negative with a ~ $1/gallon direct air carbon capture tax. (And similar for the other fossil fuels.). I recently saw $7.99 / gallon, so that's a bit over a 10% tax in some areas.

Yes, poor people need gasoline too. We should tax new ICE vehicles at some astronomical rate and plow the money into steeper EV subsidies.

Alternatively, we could tax ICE new vehicles so (assuming they run for 250K miles) the purchaser pays 100% of the carbon recapture cost up front.

We could also allow for community net metering so poor high density areas could establish nonprofit solar/wind farms that lower their electricity bills.

As far as I can tell, all these plans are deficit neutral and would also boost the economy.

[alexose]

I'm with you! I'm a big proponent of DAC. I believe it'll be the key that unlocks a circular carbon economy. But, we're still a long ways from scaling it to a level where we can offset the carbon from burning fuel.

We should be pursuing every possible avenue, especially those that might have side benefits. Sequestering dead trees could help with fuels reduction and potentially improve soil health.

(If anyone reading this wants to help scale DAC, consider joining me in OpenAir collective discord! https://openair.cc/)

[mlyle]

> Yes, poor people need gasoline too.

Just tax carbon. Use proceeds to subsidize situations where the hardship is too high (e.g. energy used by poor people).

Start small and phase in over time.

[hondo77]

> ...in Southern California (near Yosemite, etc)...

In what universe is Yosemite in Southern California?

[qorrect]

> We could also allow for community net metering so poor high density areas could establish nonprofit solar/wind farms that lower their electricity bills.

Is this something that one could do now ? I don't know where you'd begin on something like that but I'm loving this idea.

[colpabar]

>As far as I can tell, all these plans are deficit neutral and would also boost the economy.

The state of california should enact these plans so we can all see how it goes. If it works other states will follow suit. If it doesn't, more people will leave california.

>As I like to shout from the rooftops, gasoline could be made carbon negative with a ~ $1/gallon direct air carbon capture tax. (And similar for the other fossil fuels.). I recently saw $7.99 / gallon, so that's a bit over a 10% tax in some areas.

I know that gas prices are high because of putin's price hike (tm), but wasn't calfornia gas already much more expensive than other states because of state taxes? How is this one going to be different?

[ceeplusplus]

> steeper EV subsidies

It will be at least a decade before used EVs with >200mi range trickle down to the $10-15k used market. Saying we should tax gas when poor people can't even afford it as is is a gross misunderstanding of the financial situation of poor people today. You can't even buy a >200mi EV for less than 40k today.

> establish nonprofit solar/wind farms

Who's going to pay for them? And who's paying for the storage?

> also boost the economy

Boosting the price of fuel would have hugely inflationary effects while everyone is still stuck on ICEs. We saw this in the 70s, we're seeing it now.

[dfee]

This response makes about half sense. There are flaws - geographic and mathematic. Could this be a GPT3 response?