Fighting climate change may be cheaper and more beneficial than we think

...but the real kicker is that proven reserves are just a small fraction of total likely recoverable reserves long-term. Proven reserves basically assumes no tech improvement and no exploration, two things we’re continually doing. So proven reserves have actual GROWN over time and likely will. There are truly vast amounts of fossil fuels available that could be tapped if we had to tap them.

For instance, there’s over a trillion barrels of kerogen/oilshale oil (which is expensive to extract, like Canada’s oil sands) in JUST the Green River formation in Colorado/Wyoming, more than all the world’s proven oil reserves combined. But it sits untapped because oil prices are so low. And practically all of northern Alaska has coal underneath it if you drill to the right depth, 5 trillion tons (~18 trillion tons of CO2), more than four times all the world’s coal proven reserves combined. Source: https://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-077/

America alone has enough fossil fuels in the ground to single-handedly double or triple or sextuple the CO2 level. Add in similar fossil fuel amounts in much of Africa, South America, Russia, Canada, Antarctica, Australia, and the world’s oceans, and the planet would be unrecognizable.

There’s enough fossil fuels (if we tried hard enough) to get the CO2 levels in the 10,000 ppm range where there are serious long term health effects from just breathing the stuff. And psychological effects start becoming apparent at just 500-1000ppm, which we will see by the end of the century or so.

So yeah, we’ll run out of atmosphere to dump the CO2 into before we run out of fossil fuels.

I tried adding a similar caveat to my message, but my feeble attempts muddied my simple message. Even your caveat is slightly over-simplified because there's a significant time component: most ecosystems would probably be OK if the oil was burned over a few million years rather than a few decades.

Long term carbon sequestration via forests is extremely expensive as you can’t then use the land for anything else. Not extracting carbon is by far the cheapest option for long term sequestration.

PS: Sequestration of biomass underground is a viable long term option, but it’s again expensive.

But it's important, since it could buy us a few more years to implement more permanent solutions.

It is even true that the CO2 was at this point before. If it had shifted at geological timescales even if it was from human activity it would be more or less fine as the ecosystem could adapt to it like previous epoches. Certainly there would be extinctions but would give time to adapt and speciate.

Tree planting helps some but it isn't comparable at scale at all - as in running out of available landmass bad.

Tree planting would help the ultrapoor if they maintained it locally given things like impact on soil erosion and rainfall but those are only localized effects

Yes, but they also require other things to grow, so the scaling of their growth with rapidly increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration isn't as impressive as some people imagine, and it's only been empirically demonstrated in the short term. As far as I've read, the main uncertainty as to what happens in the medium-long term relates to how much nitrogen is available in the soil, and how the nitrogen-fixing topsoil ecosystem adapts. If it can thrive in such a way as to fix more nitrogen, that could lead to further plant growth. But it's also plausible that the rapid shift in the environment disrupts that system and leads to a regression in plant growth rates.

Of course. Nobody is saying there should be no CO2. But if your implication is that higher CO2 means better growth, it is generally wrong. Some plants do grow better, some don't, in a higher CO2 environment. But more importantly, it isn't as if CO2 is an independent variable. Along with it comes significant changes that plants are not adapted to -- higher average and peak temperatures, more or less rainfall (depending where in the world it is). Yes, given enough time, the plants that make it through the stresses of climate change will adapt and thrive, but in the near term (a few generations of humans) it will cause problems.

> I am not sure it was immediately obvious to people 120 years ago that CO2 was such a "dangerous" thing.

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

In short: Joseph Fourier (of the Fourier transform) advocated for the idea of atmospheric gasses causing a greenhouse effect. It was advanced along the years, in 1896 Arrhenius even calculated the effect on the climate due to a doubling of CO2. There were scientific papers published in the 50s using the terms "climate change" in the 50s, well before the Mariner 2 spacecraft.

"Carbon tax hurts the poor" is oil industry propaganda. The poor use less carbon than average -- especially the "ultra poor" -- but everyone receives the same dividend. It's a net transfer to the poor.

On top of that, the underlying cost (after accounting for tax, subsidies and regulations) for oil in poorer countries is higher than in richer countries because they have worse infrastructure for delivering fuel. You can put solar panels and batteries on a shack in the middle of a field and have electricity for decades. To do that with a gas generator you need gas stations, vehicles to deliver it, roads to drive them on etc. They don't have those things, and won't get them overnight, but meanwhile you can give them electricity today and they immediately get running water and electric light and wireless telecommunications etc. So oil is garbage for them and they're better off never burning a drop of it while the people who do are paying a carbon tax that funds a dividend they can use to buy solar panels.

> Svante August Arrhenius (19 February 1859 – 2 October 1927) was a Swedish scientist. Originally a physicist, but often referred to as a chemist, Arrhenius was one of the founders of the science of physical chemistry. He received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903, becoming the first Swedish Nobel laureate. In 1905, he became director of the Nobel Institute, where he remained until his death.

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

There's no social or economic cost to the world for acting to prevent climate change. The costs are all negative - we save vast amounts of money and societal damage by acting.

There hasn't been any serious scientific dispute over whether climate change was occurring for at least 50 years.

And of course it's completely accurate to note that the oil companies knew about the problem and have not only refused to act, but have spent massive amounts to prevent action. Many of their own documents are available on the internet for your inspection.

Carbon emissions are mostly from transportation and energy production - neither of which are goods. Both have more sustainable alternatives that a carbon tax would easily push people to use via market forces.

The relationship between tailpipe carbon emissions and temperature, and then sea-level rise, is absurdly strong scientifically speaking. Energy accounting is a very hard science. We know what IR bandwidths CO2 gas absorbs, and that translates directly to an additional heat flow. We are watching the northern sea ice disappear because of carbon emissions, and we will witness much more. The most stinging effects will be reduced agriculture output, direct temperature rise consequences, and sea-level rise. The consensus science on sea-level rise (see IPCC) results in extremely quantifiable economic damage within this century, and those are low-ball numbers. The confidence level is simply "confident". There is no reasonable question that things will be as-bad or worse than the consensus predictions. There are reasonable questions about low-probably chances that things will get much, much, worse.

But I see this article, and your post, as people promising free lunches. And when people start offering free lunches, I get real skeptical. I am also skeptical of the ability of committees of experts to make decisions about economic efficiency. To me, this article has a disingenuous ring to it. It reads like people who've made up their mind and are inventing arguments to support their decision.

If there's so much money in "green living" then all of the people on the committee should quit their jobs and go into business. They can improve the world and make money at the same time instead of telling other people how to spend their money.

The problem with using consumer taxes to fund these things is that the consumer has to consume the planet in order to save the planet. If I don't pay enviro-levy taxes at the cash register, my district can't afford waste removal. If I don't buy enough gasoline, we won't collect enough carbon tax to pay for these wetlands we need to build.

In a polarized world looking both good and bad sides of generally good thing is seen as being against.

My point is that if we want to make a real change, we can't realistically expect to fix all negative side effects that even the best solution has. If the overall solution becomes politically possible, we must hammer it trough even if we must throw many good people under the bus.

The solution is really simple, though: eat less meat. We don't need meat every day. Once or twice a week is more than enough, and if everybody did that, it would greatly reduce this problem.

If we take India, which is the country with more vegetarians than the rest of the world combined. It's estimated that 30-40% are vegetarians. A country with a strong cultural history of vegetarianism, religious beliefs that vegetarianism is "right", have the most developed vegetarian cuisine, and a system that makes it super simple to see if something is vegetarian or not - 60-70% still eat meat. If you move to the coast less than 5% are strictly vegetarians.

The issue is not consumption of meat - it's the amount. If you add nuts, beans, and protein heavy vegetables - a family of 4 can get by with 1-1.5kg of meat weekly and make sure all their micro nutrient needs are met without even trying. 1 day with fish, 1 day with red meat, and 1 day with white meat. It's a significantly more achievable goal than cutting meat all together, and it would probably result in a more healthy population than cutting meat all together because it covers all nutritional needs.

> They tend to live longer and have lower rates of cancer and heart disease than their meat-eating counterparts

As far as I've read it's not the meat that causes this, but the lack of vegetables, browning of meat, and addition of processed meat - so while a vegetarian diet solves the problem, you can retain meat in the diet and get the benefit anyway. If you have some peer reviewed scientific papers that show otherwise, I would like to see them because I have papers showing the opposite in abundance.

For every product that leaves the farm, it takes something from the ground. Some can be amended with legume plants, but minerals will deplete at some point - adding them yearly is responsible farming.