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by nells 1297 days ago
There’s absolutely no way to compute the price of the damage that every ton of CO2 is going to do, so whatever value you choose is going to be arbitrary and ultimately unfair.
3 comments

What’s the cost of sequestering each ton of CO2? $30? $90? Prohibitively high for some purposes? Well that seems like a relatively good place to start. Having a positive number adjustable based on large scale statistics does a hell of a lot more to fix market incentives than pricing it at a constant $0 and banning one specific thing (in a way which can’t even be enforced) as a political gimmick.
You can also price it at $0 and NOT ban it.
And why would you price it at $0 if it's already known it does cause damages. Just because you can't fairly price it doesn't mean it costs zero, that's an absurd logic...
Sure, but that does nothing to help with the tragedy of the commons caused by unaddressed negative externalities…
This is more like the politician's syllogism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism

Except it actually addresses a serious problem on two fronts

1) reducing the ability to profit off of actions that cause environmental damage thereby aligning the market interest to reduce such actions

2) funding the investment in reversing the damage

whereas your suggestion above is doing literally nothing to help…

A fair minimum tax is one that ensures we stay below catastrophic per-capita emissions, as estimated by the IPCC, created exactly for understanding climate change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Cli...

Why I have to believe this report when I do not see even accurate weather forecasts one week ahead in many cases?

I really think that the possibility of obtaining the wrong conclusions are much higher than getting it right, yet the consequences of putting a ton of restrictions is really harmful for many people, especially in developing countries.

Regarding weather and climate: Those aren't the same thing.

Maybe you could compare it to dice. It's very hard to predict on what number a dice is going to land. But if you throw it a lot of times, you'll eventually start to see the distribution converge somewhere. And when you then take a drill and make a hole in the side of the dice, or glue something to its side or whatever, and then throw it a lot of times again, you'll see that the distribution changes. Also, you can make reasonable statements about those developments. "If I make it heavier on the side opposite six, I think I'll start seeing more sixes, because the side opposite is pulled down more by gravity". You don't need to be able to predict the short-term outputs of a system to see changes in its long-term trends, and you can absolutely reason about and possibly predict those long-term changes.

Maybe you are right guys, Idk. But I am skeptical, not of the change in the climate. That is a fact. But of the whole set of things (full model) that provokes it.

I think it is a really difficult thing to guess. And anyways, even if it is not, how can you stop it if China, India and US say no to it bc there is no current technology to replace?

We could be in the situation where a lot of restrictions are set and later the guess is wrong. More expensive energy means putting a ton of people back into poverty, literally.

Why do I have to believe my math teacher when he says he knows the distribution of rolling a pair of dice 1000 times when he cannot even predict the next roll of the dice?
Then the weather forecast should be guessable all the time also I guess. It is not.

But the dice experiment is: one leaves variables out of the model bc of its overwhelming complexity for what we know so far.

No, I do not buy this, vote me negative but I do not. If it was true, the weather forecast should be guessable.

Dang, you beat me to it!
This report is the outcome of thousands of scientists collaborating.

What it predicts for developing countries is disaster, which we already see. More droughts in the summer combined with floods in spring/autumn.

This leads to food insecurity and ecosystem disruption, which will be more harmful than not doing anything.

Weather is hard to predict short-term, but the long-term trends (i.e. climate) are visible.

Right, this includes pricing it at zero which is what we're doing now.