[colechristensen]

Carbon taxes aren’t necessary to give solar and wind an advantage. More than half of ~55GW new power generation capacity in the US this year is going to be solar.

> while ignoring that we have not managed to lower our carbon usage

We have in the US, both total and per capita. Carbon per person is down nearly 25% since 2000.

People seem to make up statistics in their heads to match what they think is going on.

[graeme]

World growth is the only metric that matters. USA offshored many industries which use CO2.

World carbon growth has not peaked as you can see here: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

CO2 is also most analogous to an overflowing bathtub. Lowering the rate would be great if we can get there, but what we really need is to get to zero new CO2 emissions.

We are a long way off from that so every new energy use worsens the issue until we get there.

[kragen]

if your bathtub is overflowing you should unplug the drain; atmospheric carbon capture is not cheap, but not infeasibly expensive either, and will surely be necessary

[graeme]

I agree, but you can only stretch an analogy so far. Unplugging a bathtub is free, whereas capturing carbon currently is more costly than the energy used to capture it.

[kragen]

taken literally you seem to be saying that there are costs other than energy involved in atmospheric carbon capture, which is too obvious to be worth saying; your capex and non-energy opex costs can be low but they obviously can't be zero or negative

do you mean more costly than the energy obtained by burning it, because that's a small edit that converts your statement into an assertion that's at least coherent

if so, no, the cost is about an order of magnitude smaller; though coherent, your assertion is still wrong