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Comment by sxates | Hacker News Reader

These are all good ideas, but the ferocity of change worries me. And I'm the sort of person who thinks climate change is the single biggest policy issue facing our country (and all the other countries) and and spending big $ personally to reduce my impact.

My fear is that we take a big sledgehammer to the fossil fuel industry and infrastructure, and in so doing also take a big sledgehammer to our entire economy. So big in fact that we face a generational backlash against de-carbonizing.

It takes time to make big shifts like this. People can't switch from fossil-dependent careers to renewable-dependent careers in a week, or even a year. We have to ramp up the renewable infrastructure at the same pace we wind down the legacy infrastructure, and in a way that doesn't bankrupt entire towns and even states.

Maybe it's not possible to tackle this without great pain to a lot of people. Maybe if we had a 'Pearl Harbor' type event that galvanized a super majority of americans into action and sacrifice...

I'm pessimistic that we'll have that moment, that we'll change that many minds, or that we'll have the fortitude and resolve to do what must be done.

But I'm glad Inslee is doing what he's doing, and working through the policies we'd need to get there, not just talking about doing "something".

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> My fear is that we take a big sledgehammer to the fossil fuel industry and infrastructure, and in so doing also take a big sledgehammer to our entire economy. So big in fact that we face a generational backlash against de-carbonizing.

It still seems like the best solution is a revenue-neutral carbon tax, i.e. a carbon tax which is merely refunded to everyone in the form of a fixed tax credit.

Then the average person pays e.g. $5000 in carbon tax but receives a $5000 tax credit. But the person who burns a disproportionate amount of carbon pays $7000 and still only receives the $5000 credit, meanwhile someone who burns less carbon pays only $2000 and actually turns a profit after the tax credit.

Then we don't need all of this command and control. People have the right incentives, so they buy electric cars and heat pumps and solar panels, and the problem solves itself. The only real thing you have to tweak is the amount of the tax/credit, to adjust the trade off between being too fast/disruptive and too slow/ineffective.

> It still seems like the best solution is a revenue-neutral carbon tax, i.e. a carbon tax which is merely refunded to everyone in the form of a fixed tax credit.

A revenue neutral carbon tax means that government is dependent for funding for operations (or, if you follow MMP, “is dependent for extracting sufficient money from the economy for the current degree of inflation control”) on continued carbon emissions at the present level.

> A revenue neutral carbon tax means that government is dependent for funding for operations (or, if you follow MMP, “is dependent for extracting sufficient money from the economy for the current degree of inflation control”) on continued carbon emissions at the present level.

Not if the amount of the tax credit in a given year is tied to the amount of revenue the tax generates, i.e. it remains revenue-neutral. Then it automatically phases itself out as less carbon is burned.

Revenue neutral carbon taxes are a fantasy, because they are pushed by progressive politicians, yet are deeply regressive in their impact.

Inslee admits this, and simply wants to add a new tax, and refund it selectively to people who he thinks deserve the money/access to electricity, and outlaw the use cases which don't.

Purely coincidentally this is the same effect as making the tax system more progressive, but actually it's all about climate change.

Revenue neutral carbon taxes are the most pro-market, libertarian friendly answer thus far to the reality of climate change. They're pushed by progressive politicians only because of the factual urgency of climate change. The USA can limp along with shitty healthcare forever, but irreversible climate damage is irreversible, and we don't have time for the partisan bullshit.

The high order bit is the complete disengagement from the American right on this issue. The carbon-tax-with-dividend is meant to be table stakes. The onus is on the other side to show up to the table at all.

> Revenue neutral carbon taxes are a fantasy, because they are pushed by progressive politicians, yet are deeply regressive in their impact.

I don't understand where you're getting that they're regressive. The poor don't have big mansions, they have little studio apartments which take less fuel to heat. They don't drive big SUVs with a single passenger, they take the bus or the subway. They don't travel by air or own stock in oil companies.

But they get the same tax credit as anyone else, so they pay less than average while receiving the same amount. That's not regressive at all, it's a net transfer to the poor.

They also can't just move out of cold climates and buy high-efficiency windows whenever they like. And many of them live in rural places where they do drive inefficient vehicles and have almost no public transportation.

> They also can't just move out of cold climates and buy high-efficiency windows whenever they like. And many of them live in rural places where they do drive inefficient vehicles and have almost no public transportation.

Except that they get a big tax credit with which they can buy high-efficiency windows and a more efficient vehicle. Which then saves them even more in the long run because it remains more efficient indefinitely.

Moreover, the argument you're making is that regions that use more carbon will be impacted more by measures to reduce carbon emissions. No kidding. That's true of any solution. But what does that have to do with income level? If anything it's the opposite -- there are more affluent people in cold places like the Northeast and suburbs with poor mass transit, and more poor people in the South and Southwest where it's warmer and commutes are shorter for the poor because real estate costs less so people can live closer to their jobs.

>Except that they get a big tax credit with which they can buy high-efficiency windows and a more efficient vehicle.

They will? It sounded like people with less efficient vehicles/heating would get smaller tax credits, not larger. So why would they get a big tax credit? It seems to me that the people getting a big tax credit would be those who have no children, live in warm climates, and have modern high-efficiency homes and vehicles. Not sure why anyone would think that includes poor people...

>Moreover, the argument you're making is that regions that use more carbon will be impacted more by measures to reduce carbon emissions.

The argument that I am making is that knowing a person is 'poor' is not sufficient to predict their emissions or amenities, and extrapolating the lifestyle of one poor straw person onto all of them is stupid.

>If anything it's the opposite -- there are more affluent people in cold places like the Northeast and suburbs with poor mass transit, and more poor people in the South and Southwest where it's warmer and commutes are shorter for the poor because real estate costs less so people can live closer to their jobs.

Lol. Maybe facts are actually important here.

> They will? It sounded like people with less efficient vehicles/heating would get smaller tax credits, not larger.

Everyone gets the same tax credit. It's the people who burn more carbon that pay more taxes. But if you use your tax credit to reduce your carbon footprint to below average, or if it already was, then you're receiving more than you're paying. And buying those things save you money in general (nobody gains from losing heat to poor insulation), so you come out ahead twice, at the expense of Richie Rich now paying twice as much to fly around in a private jet without changing his behavior.

> have no children

You're assuming the children (or their parents) don't get the tax credit. There is no reason that would have to be the case. It should be a fixed amount per-person and children are people.

> The argument that I am making is that knowing a person is 'poor' is not sufficient to predict their emissions or amenities, and extrapolating the lifestyle of one poor straw person onto all of them is stupid.

Then the argument you're making has nothing to do with whether a carbon tax is regressive or not. Finding one poor person with a high carbon footprint doesn't tell you anything about the average. And poor people in general do not consume more resources in absolute terms than more affluent people -- that's nearly the definition of being poor.

> Lol. Maybe facts are actually important here.

Indeed. So who burns more carbon per capita in actual fact, people with more money or people with less money? It would be quite surprising to discover it was the latter. But it isn't:

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/12/1/1671884...

Poor people are poor. They don't have money to afford things. That's what it means to be poor, and that's who we're talking about when we're talking about poor people.

So it is a matter of definition that poor people cannot afford to decrease their carbon footprint. I've said nothing to compare poor people to affluent, or made any argument dependent upon demographics whatsoever. (In fact, I've been arging that the only thing safe to assume about poor people is that they are poor.) And poor people cannot afford new cars and homes.

Given this, they will not be getting new cars and homes unless someone else pays for them. If you give them a tax credit and then immediately charge them for having inefficient homes/cars, then you haven't changed anything. They still can't afford new cars or homes, because they are still poor. Certainly they will not spend their <$5000 on highly efficient cars and homes.. both because this is not enough money for such things, and because they have more pressing needs to spend that money on.

The only way a tax policy will not be regressive is if you give more money to poor people than to rich people. Giving people discounts for taking specific actions does not achieve this in any way, because rich people always have more options, more easily taken, than poor people.

> I've said nothing to compare poor people to affluent, or made any argument dependent upon demographics whatsoever.

Which is where you're going wrong, because if the tax is structured in this way then who comes out ahead depends entirely on where they are in relation to other people. It's revenue neutral but results in net transfers to those who burn less carbon than average -- and the poor characteristically burn less carbon than average.

> If you give them a tax credit and then immediately charge them for having inefficient homes/cars, then you haven't changed anything.

Poor people start off with lower carbon footprints, because being poor means they had less money to spend burning carbon to begin with. So they start by paying e.g. $2000 in carbon tax while receiving $5000 in credit, leaving $3000 to spend reducing their carbon footprint even more.

> Certainly they will not spend their <$5000 on highly efficient cars and homes.. both because this is not enough money for such things, and because they have more pressing needs to spend that money on.

It is enough, and they're not stupid.

Currently a used hybrid uses e.g. $1000/year less fuel than a different used car that costs $1500 less. If the fuel cost difference doubles to $2000/year but they get a $5000/year credit, they use the first $1500 to trade their car for the hybrid because now it saves them $2000/year, which is more than $1500. The logic of doing this has nothing to do with what else you have to buy; either way it nets you $500 more this year and $2000 more next year.

> The only way a tax policy will not be regressive is if you give more money to poor people than to rich people.

Not so. It is also possible to do it by giving the same amount to everyone while the rich pay more in taxes.

The plan looks feasible to me. Certainly much more feasible than Kennedy's pledge to land on the moon before the end of the decade...

Certainly much more feasible than stopping manufacturing of all non-military steel products and asking people to donate steel for manufacturing tools, weapons, and vehicles for WW2.

The issue isn't that it's a huge task. The issue is that the current industries and governments are dragging their feet trying to mik every penny they can from their current dynasty.

> People can't switch from fossil-dependent careers to renewable-dependent careers in a week, or even a year.

Or ever, perhaps. I can no longer remember where, but I recently read an article about a backlash by California Democrats against Green New Deal-type ideas. What stood out was someone saying that the idea of retraining workers for other types of jobs was offensive. If people in the oil and gas industry liked their job, then they ought to be allowed to keep it until they retired.

That's a tough thing. Imagine someone was telling you that you had to change your career because people decided it's no good. What will you do? Put your life on hold and go retrain for something you never intended to train for? Possibly (probably) earn less? Potentially need to move for work? It's complicated.

I think it needs to happen. The US and Canada both spend major subsidies on oil and gas, and that money would do wonders in supporting and retraining these works. However, we'd need a very good plan and very good acceptance of it amongst the work force and tax payers. This would all be incredibly expensive. People would resent the retraining because it would cost tax payers to benefit a small subset of people, while less oil production equals higher prices for... Everything. People would be very upset, both workers and citizens.

It's going to be so hard to get people on the same page. I hope the disasters that push us to act aren't too awful.

It’s already happened for almost everyone employed mining coal, because of automation. No climate change needed.

Just for perspective, coal mining employs about half as many Americans as Whole Foods. That’s one specialty grocery chain. The amount of attention given to coal miners is absurd.

Before or after automation?

That’s right now.

The opiate epidemic has been killing off coal miners with no letup in sight. https://blog.exploratory.io/how-coal-mining-employment-has-i...

Post automation numerical comparisons are not that useful then?

Why not? The point is that there are very few coal miners left and the amount of attention they get is all out of proportion.

Must be nostalgic folks remembering the "good old days."

The UK had a million people working in the coal industry at the start of the last century, it’s effectively zero now.

However it was painful for many of the communities that depended on it, you could argue some have never recovered.

It's much the same here in BC, Canada. Mines, forestry, fishing - different resource extraction jobs have fluctuated enormously over the last century and we effectively have ghost towns all over. Some places look absolutely dead and you wonder why anyone lives there. At one point, most of them were booming. The gold rush was probably the original boom, and from there many others stemmed. Forestry is probably the most tragic, long-tailed bust in this province though.

Do we also need to ensure jobs for carriage makers?

If we do a green new deal type of thing, I think it will work out in aggregate. There will be a massive increase in training for people to work on the manufacturing/installation of renewable energy production and another large need for engineers to design the new manufacturing components, electrical grid, and the large scale installations. Many manufacturing and installation jobs for fossil fuels will be lost but many similar jobs will also be created with renewables.

We generally seem to be ok with saying "eh, screw em" when people's livelihoods become obsolete. I don't see why this should be any different, given the stakes.

The market does this anyways in the energy industry: oil people don’t have jobs when oil prices are low, my dad was in nuclear and got hit in the late 80s (didn’t need to retrain, but his career was stagnate until retirement).

If we were to start sequestering CO2 then it seems to me the people in the oil and gas industry have both the skills and scale to do that.

I see your point. You don't want to wallop an entire industry but at some point it kind of has to happen.

"The second piece is phasing out fossil fuel production more broadly. Inslee would establish a “Presidential Commission on Energy Transition” (including the secretaries of several federal agencies) that will be “tasked with identifying and setting in motion the implementation of federal policies to phase out domestic fossil fuel production.” The commission will have a special focus on a “just transition” for fossil fuel workers and communities."

My biggest concern here. Hope it is more comprehensive than this vox outline.

Incrementalism is definitely safer, but it also doesn't work because every 4-8 years, global warming fans take over and unwind all the incremental improvements that have been made and kick us further down the slope towards complete disaster. Observe how in the US renewables investments and climate progress are being undone while the current political leaders are talking about bringing back coal. No amount of incremental progress will help if that stuff happens repeatedly. We have to fix it soon and fix it thoroughly so that our incremental progress doesn't just get undone in 4-8 years while the rest of the world is still sorting out their part of the climate crisis.

Thirty years is a long time. Think about how different the economy was in, say, 1930 compared to 1900. Or 1840 to 1870. How much fossil fuel infrastructure lasts for thirty years? We could almost do it by just using the natural replacement cycle.

This right here is why nothing will happen and we're hosed.

> It takes time to make big shifts like this.

We have 11 years to cut global CO2 emissions by 50%, and even that may not be enough.

> Maybe it's not possible to tackle this without great pain to a lot of people.

That might have been possible if we'd started in earnest 30 years ago. Now, we have a choice between serious lifestyle discomfort in the short term or famine and death in the long term. I expect we'll opt for our grandchildren's generation to starve.

> Now, we have a choice between serious lifestyle discomfort in the short term or famine and death in the long term. I expect we'll opt for our grandchildren's generation to starve

It's statements like this, which are completely absurd, which are hindering our progress of making meaningful change.

Please stop using armegeddon like language to describe climate change. It doesn't help if you sound like a crazed cultist.

> It's statements like this, which are completely absurd, which are hindering our progress of making meaningful change.

Only the degree of certainty of the statement is exaggerated. The content is well within any reasonable scenario-planning approach. Near-term catastrophe may not be the most likely outcome, but on all accounts it is likely enough to be the most genuinely alarming threat we've yet faced. You may not like the tone, but surely you can muster the courage to set aside your personal taste with regard to something so important?

> You may not like the tone, but surely you can muster the courage to set aside your personal taste with regard to something so important?

You sound exactly like a Jehovah's witness or a Mormon missionary.

Yikes, this and your previous comment are bannable offences on HN. Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines, and sticking to the spirit of this site when posting here? We're hoping for a bit better than internet median: thoughtful, substantive comments, basically.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I heavily disagree with your rather mild assessment of climate change. As an example, I suggest you look at the drought in India in 2019 [0], its effects on South Africa [1], and its role in the Syrian crisis. [2]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/12/indian-village... [1] https://www.finglobal.com/2019/05/09/climate-change-in-south... [2] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/03/150302-syri...

We tiptoed around these issues for years, using names like "global warming" and "climate change". It's time we started using the right names: we are in a crisis and we have an impending catastrophe.

CO2 has already dropped by nearly 20% in the US over the past decade naturally, as renewables becoming cheaper and buildings, appliances, and manufacturing becomes more efficient.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=38133

This is a secular trend that I imagine will continue regardless of what politicians do.

Unfortunately none of the US/EU cuts will matter in the end with the track China is on.

https://blogs-images.forbes.com/rrapier/files/2018/07/Countr...

Your second chart shows China appears to be leveling off, at a total level that is a little less that twice the total US emissions.

Since they have more than 4x the US population, that means they have quite a bit lower per capita emission, which is a more useful metric than total emissions when assessing how well a country is addressing the issue, since the atmosphere doesn't care about arbitrary political boundaries.

China also produces much less per capita for that emission. A better metric is productive output per unit of emissions. The metric that matters isn't the per capita emissions but the amount of value generated relative to emissions.

Productive output by what measure? Probably the most immediately obvious choice would be GDP, but upon closer examination I don't think that works.

By that measure, using a given amount of emissions running a factory that builds expensive, fossil fuel burning luxury boats for rich playboys is better than using that same emissions to provide winter heat for public schools.

Another problem with using a measure of productive output is that it screws developing counties. As I said earlier, the atmosphere does not care about arbitrary political boundaries.

There is some global maximum emissions per year that we can allow if we want to keep climate change from getting out of hand. If we make each country's share of that global pool proportional to their productive output, we are in effect saying that the rich countries get to continue to take advantage of cheap high emission things (like coal), and the poor counties have to forego that for clean but more expensive things, because there is a pretty good correlation between the wealth of a country and its productivity.

Since the rich countries are, to a large extent, rich because they exploited those cheap but dirty resources before we knew how harmful that was, it seems to make more moral sense for the rich countries to have to clean up first and/or subsidize the costs to poor countries of going clean.

Probably what would be better would be to figure out the total worldwide emissions allowed per year, allocate that among countries on an equal per capita basis, and allow countries to trade their shares.

> Unfortunately none of the US/EU cuts will matter in the end with the track China is on.

There's an obvious solution to this. Carbon tariffs.

If Trump can tariff China for largely nationalistic, non-sense, sore-loser reasons, we almost certainly have the ability to tariff China with actionable reasons (Reduce your carbon emissions, and we will lift the tariffs.)

Unfortunately, we actually need to reduce our emissions (Or apply similar penalties to domestic polluters), before we can do something like that.

Funny, that you say that. I actually think, policy based deprecation is the biggest possible boost the economy could get.

Think CDs Vs Vinyl, VHS to DVD. Or more on point: Catalytic converters.

Having to buy new stuff drives the economy, being content with "what works" throttles it (e.g. mobile devices, laptops).

Sure, there might be a backlash, but it's not like there isn't any opposition now.

Being to cautious (i.e. slow) bears the risk that people resist change because you are slowly (ergo constantly) changing things, and they don't see the benefit of the policy change.

(Assuming that it is indeed the case)

Edit: missing verb

To add to this, which I think is entirely correct, it took the effects of spending on arming for WW2 that finally brought the world out of the Great Depression. Unemployment went down and the economy surged. The US New Deal helped but it wasn't nearly enough.

Edit: Is this controversial somehow? I thought it pretty standard and well known history.

There's an old remark: "Recession and depression are the easiest things in the world to cure -- just print money.".

The cause of our recessions and depressions was suddenly too little money. That is, a lot of money was destroyed. How? When the banks, etc. got in trouble, the multiplier effect enormously reduced the money supply.

Soooooo, have some new regulations on reserve ratios, etc. for banks and then print the missing money. The new regulations will keep the banks, etc. from using the newly printed money and the multiplier effect to create too much money and inflation.

Many millions of people died before these ideas were accepted.

How to print money? One way is for the Federal Reserve to buy bonds from the US Treasury. Then the Treasury has the money and the Federal Government can spend it, e.g., on roads, bridges, dams, etc. Another way is for the Federal Reserve to loan money to the member banks, and the banks loan the money to people who want to buy houses, cars, commercial buildings, etc.

How did WWII get us out of the Depression? Once people started shooting at us, we were willing to print money for the war. But we printed about the right amount since after the war we didn't have massive inflation.

The US Government started printing money as you say for government projects as early as 1930, 12 years before the war. Hoover dam for example. So are you saying it takes 12+ years for your theory to work? Also, how many millions more have died due to over-printing of money? MMT is a disaster waiting to happen because at the end of the day Credit=Trust and you can only borrow so much before you lose that trust. Trust is everything and debt is an incursion.

They printed money starting in 1930? Yup, the dam. But they didn't print enough.

And Bernanke didn't print enough fast enough -- we were in the Great Depression for about 12 years and nearly that long in the Great Recession. Bummer.

You are correct about the threat of inflation. But we know how to stop inflation: Reduce the money supply, e.g., by raising interest rates. Then the member banks will return their loans from the Fed.

So MMT stands for <i>modern monetary theory</i>? Uh, I tend to avoid any theories from economists and stay with simple observations.

If you look at debt between 1920 and 1945 you see that between 1940 and 1945 the war economy resulted in private and corporate debt replaced almost entirely by Federal government debt.

After 2008 the Chinese government dealt with falling demand and exports by building 10,000km of high speed rail network.

In either case despite dire predictions of economists the sky didn't fall in.

Also riddle this: The US spent about 2% of gdp to send a dozen men to the moon. And the sky didn't fall in either.

The US can certainly spend a couple of single digits worth of GDP on renewables without everything falling apart.

> Also riddle this: The US spent about 2% of gdp to send a dozen men to the moon. And the sky didn't fall in either.

The sky fell in on the Soviet Union. The main difference was the Marshall plan and the fact that the US was financing the rebuilding of Europe

> The US can certainly spend a couple of single digits worth of GDP on renewables without everything falling apart.

Yup, not everything would "fall apart". Yup.

But 50 projects each taking just 2% of GDP would take 100% of GDP! 2% of GDP is a lot, e.g., what the NATO countries are supposed to have been spending on defense but long didn't.

Let's see: IIRC Trump is spending about $807 billion a year on defense, and just now from Google the US GDP per year is about $19.39 T. Sooooo,

100 * 807 / 19,390 = 4.162

says that we are spending just over 4% of GDP on defense. So, a "couple of single digits", i.e., if I read you correctly, would be 2% of GDP and about half of defense -- definitely not small potatoes.

I have a friend with a lot of money in a family with a lot of money. Whenever anyone asks him to spend some of his money, his first question is "Why should I?". Without a good answer, he doesn't.

I see what you're saying, but I'm not sure it's analogous. Lets say the cost of gasoline triples in the next 5 years because we're killing all subsidies, ending federal leases, etc., enough to justify everyone to make investments in electric cars. We literally can't make them fast enough. Making a million CDs was easy, but our heavy industries take a lot longer to tool up. Tesla is struggling to scale their supply chain, and they're consuming almost half the world's battery supplies right now to make a few hundred thousand cars per year.

And that's just cars - not including semi-trucks, farm equipment, buses, trains, shipping, etc.

Best case we need a decade to start manufacturing those things at scale and two decades to manufacture them at a pace that can start replacing all the existing vehicles. That's a long time for anyone stuck paying for gas.

And it's a similar situation for the Electricity sector, Cement and construction, and dozens of other industries that emit carbon. It's a really complicated transition - far more than switching media formats.

Making a million CDs involved building entire new factories to meet demand. Making a lot more electric vehicles could reuse a lot more existing factories (and/or recently shuttered factories) if demand shifted enough away from internal combustion to retool a lot of existing lines in place. The difference between an EV and an ICE car on the factory floor are fewer than between a cassette tape and CD.

Whether or not, say, Detroit is still capable of making a rapid shift to such a demand change is certainly a new question, and indeed supply chains would have to follow. On the other hand, again, the supply chains are a lot closer between EVs and ICE Vehicles, and if anything EV supply chains are simpler on paper with one big exception (batteries). But that big exception is one that is already busy scaling drastically and generally seems to know how to scale to demand (because it touches so many other industries such as computing).

It's a chicken-and-egg nightmare, certainly, that heavy industries aren't going to scale it unless they have no other choice, and the reasons to give them no other choice may have some transitional hiccups. That said, the capability to make that rapid shift is theoretically in a really strong place, we have the technology and wherewithal if we made it a priority.

The real issue here is that there is a natural market replacement rate. You sell a million cars a year even though there are 25 million of your cars on the road. That means it will take 25 years to replace all of the cars even if you switch 100% to the new type. If you want to replace them all in 15 years then you would have to sell below cost in order to induce more than the typical amount of demand for new cars.

So replacement at the natural rate is economical, replacement at a faster rate gets expensive quickly. To do that you have to force people to replace cars they otherwise wouldn't have, which either means more subsidies (expensive) or taxes (expensive), or both. On top of that it requires the resources spent on the existing car to be lost when it gets removed from service before its natural end of life, and it causes you to have to build excess manufacturing capacity to build more than the natural amount of new cars, which then goes idle and has to be written off once all cars are of the new type and the measures to artificially stimulate demand are discontinued.

All this to say that it's quite important that the transition starts now with as many electric vehicles as possible, because the more we do now the less we have to compress the timeline later and pay all of these costs.

I think that's part of what I was getting it: that precisely because it would be a useful challenge for our somewhat complacent heavy industries, it may be something useful to force their hands, because they probably aren't likely to do it until it is too late unless forced. Because it would be a challenge isn't a reason not to force it. It's a "Moon shot" problem, we can go to the moon this decade, but we need to be forced.

The problem right now is that carbon isn't priced and there consequently isn't much incentive for individual companies to do it at all, much less right away. Change that and there is suddenly much more demand for new vehicles that don't burn carbon, at which point industry knows perfectly well how to manufacture to meet market demand.

I agree. We should have been taxing carbon as far back as at least the 70s around when the idea was first proposed. Establish cap and trade then too if we are asking for ponies that were PRed to death by business men to avoid externalities.

Separate thought related to this--

I've personally made the following investments to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide I'm directly emitting -- and these are the sorts of things we'll need millions of people to do in the coming years:

* 6kw of solar panels (no A/C): $22,000 * Powerwall batteries to power house when not sunny: $18,000 * Whole house insulation as part of remodel: $15,000 * Conversion of all kitchen appliances from gas to electric: $5000 * Replace gas water heater with electric heat pump: $3-4000 * Electric car: $30k+ (mine was $50+)

The remaining gas-powered appliance in the house in our furnace, which I'll get to replacing in the next few years (est $15k) - at which point we'll probably also have a second electric car, and need to increase our solar production as well to keep up.

How many people can afford the above list for their homes? In 10 years if the above items cost half what they do now, how many can afford it then? How many landlords are going to make these investments for rental properties?

The transition we face is potentially economically stimulating (there's a lot of stuff to replace!), but also has really high up-front costs (and sunk costs) that will have to be managed. This goes both for national infrastructure all the way down to people's homes.

Pretty much nobody can afford to do that. At best you could stop selling new gas appliances and gas cars at some point and then wait 20 years for the old ones to naturally fall out of use. But a corollary is that you have to slowly ramp up carbon prices over 20 years.

I wonder how much carbon was emitted from all your investments.

Short term thinking

As someone who doesn’t own a car or fly anywhere because of climate change I don’t think you can accuse me of short term thinking.

That's really good to hear. It wasn't a personal attack, just calling out that one specific point you made. For reasons the sibling post pointed out.

More than 0, hopefully less than will be offset.

But I think part of why you were accused of short term thinking here is that if we don't spend the carbon to build things like solar panels now, we'll never move off a carbon economy. We have to accept that manufacturing of anything isn't entirely green right now, but the solar panels we make now will enable the next solar panels to be built with less carbon, which will enable the next batch to be built with less carbon, etc.

Carbon will power the innovations that get us off carbon - no way around that. But we still have to do it so we can get to that end state where entire supply chains are electrified with renewable energy.

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