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Comment by fc_barnes | Hacker News Reader

Well jeez. I know it's not a popular thought on HN, but climate change is a problem of such scale that it's going to need government-level funding and oversight to find and validate geoengineering solutions, and global-level funding and coordination to implement them. This third-way aspiration to a non-government solution just seems like a pipe dream.

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Could it be the case that contemporary governments and economies are just simply not structured to be forward thinking in this way?

What if, in analogy to the transition out of feudalism, the next evolution of government and economies is one that allows for spending on future outcomes in a way that is impossible now? I have no idea what those institutions would look like -- I only know that hoping to solve global problems with the caveat that it needs to be profitable for someone has a whiff of obvious nonsense to me. And I also know, that at least in the US, the prospect that the government will implement large-scale change is patent nonsense.

> Could it be the case that contemporary governments and economies are just simply not structured to be forward thinking in this way?

I'm confused that this is a quesiton that you're asking, as opposed to something that is blatantly obvious. The United Nations declared as such recently:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/18/ending...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/climate-change-capitalism-eco...

    "Trusting that the free market capitalist dynamics will get us
    there, that of course is not going to happen," report co-author
    Paavo Järvensivu, an academic who specializes in economics and
    culture at Bios, says in a phone call with HuffPost. Economies
    that rely on the power of markets, notes the report, don’t even
    recognize the problem as they’re too focused on short-term
    profits to take account of longer-term issues like climate change
    and environmental destruction.

Well going on the tone in the rest of their comment I read that as a firmly tongue in cheek rhetorical question. As in: From the department of the blatantly obvious comes the question "Could it be the case...

By analogy to feudalism that we need a transformative change to something, an unknown something, that is different but a little better at seeing a big picture rather than endless blinkered dogma.

That quote is about markets, not governments. It's not great to mix up those two like the parent did. Governments are moving to mitigate climate change. Not all of them at the same pace, and none at the optimal pace, but things are certainly improving on the government front.

Most current governmental structures are innately intwined with the economic system.

Yes, which is why the government can fix what the market messed up, because market participants weren't charged for the costs of the externalities they are responsible for. Carbon taxes can change that.

At this point, carbon taxes are really pretty much ephemeral, something that is basically too little, too late. You're adding more tax to a pile that the company already doesn't pay.

It's possible to create a way out of this by taking finance structures and adapting them to service public goods. A climate project bank might issue loan/grant type funding for projects, in a model much like how the U.S. mortgage market and fannie mae works right now. Loans are assessed for risk and financial return, and we can use the same type of transactional examination for a hybrid of risk, financial, and carbon-reducing-sinking effect. Personally, I think issuance of loans at a discount relative to current commercial loan rates (maybe by offering a discount rate based off of a base of Fed rates), would offer strong leverage with elements of responsiveness to market fluctuations.

What says the end points on the receiving end of the monies don't just jack up the rates similar to the University system in the U.S.?

The end points receiving the money don't decide the rates. And because multiple loan originators exist within that structure, they compete to minimize overhead.

The world could agree on Carbon Tax, and all the Tax will all be used for battling Climate Change. Funding Project like this one. ( Although. doubt this Project isn't without its downside, my guts reaction tells me there will be other problems in chemical reaction at this scale )

And it should be something like the EURO Cars emission standards, where the whole plan goes in multiple stages, giving time for businesses to adopt.

And all of a sudden all the business have an incentive to lower the Total Carbon emission, that includes everything they consume ( which would have Carbon Tax on it ). They could also buy Carbon Credit to offset any Carbon they produce. These Carbon Credit will obviously come from project like this or Renewable Energy.

Having the World to agree on Carton Tax is the hardest part.

And if the tax cripples business, it will slow emissions anyway

Also innovation.

The opposite of innovation is business as usual. Taxation always leads to innovation, sometimes they are not exclusively in the field of accounting.

Do you have any support for your claim that taxation leads to innovation?

I don't know about 'leads to', I mean, innovation quite clearly precedes taxation, otherwise it would be rather difficult to invent it, but taxation definitely directly funds far more innovation than the private sector does, at least if we are talking about fundamental research.

I was boldly going with a universal quantifier ("always") which might be a bit of an exaggeration, but I wasvery careful of getting the direction right. "All taxation leads to (some form of) innovation" is a very different statement from "all innovation comes from taxation".

The sibling fields of tax evasion and tax avoidance are both full of creativity.

If you want more technical examples, taxation systems that tried to get hard at personal transportation while mostly omitting business use led to both the SUV and to modern diesel. We may dislike both outcomes and making a bigger car more comfortable isn't exactly difficult, but the technology in modern diesel engines is absolutely amazing, even if adjusted for cheating. And clearly evidence to taxation influence, as it was exclusively developed in countries that went for fuel type instead of vehicle mass for being soft on commercial transport.

PS: and just think of the things some Finns are supposedly willing to do to extract a little bang from a given quantity of alcohol, taxation is the exclusive driver of that.

If you by innovation means coming up with loop holes then yes. If you mean it leads to some fundamental innovation that improves the taxed subject then I am pretty sure you would be hard pressed to find anything backing that claim up.

There won't be much innovation going on in a +4° degree world. People will be busy fighting over food and water.

But there might be important innovation before then, such as ways to counteract and adapt to a +4° degree world.

Personally I'd rather not risk that "might" and instead hope for the "might" of sufficient investment to prevent that world.

The important part is pretending something will be done (ideally by someone else), not actually tackling it.

I'm an advocate that places like YCombinator should be pushing the places they invest in to take this seriously.

Every company should have to present an environmental action plan and plan to become Carbon Neutral as part of its investment strategy. Right now, because it's the right thing to do, in future, because environmental exposure is a huge risk for companies

YC has led the world in tech investments and growth/value creation by typical measures. It should lead the world by environmental measures also.

Good luck convincing anyone whose goal is to make money cheaply

True that. Unfortunately I'm now at a view that it will take hundreds of millions in wealthy developed countries dieing for people to take climate change seriously.

Have you seen https://carbon.ycombinator.com ? It's less of a plan for going carbon neutral, and more of a list of moonshots for carbon reversal.

It seems the site doesn't work with https on my device. http://carbon.ycombinator.com

Yep. [flagged] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20403752

Can you point to a scientifically predicted and demonstrated (not just speculated) consequence of climate change we don't know how to deal with?

How do we deal with 10-12 feet of global sea level rise nearly instantaneously? There is a single glacier called in an Antarctica called Thwaites which is also known as the "cork" on an Antarctic sea that, if it melts or comes unstuck, could cause that much sea level rise that quickly.

"Thwaites is like a cork in a wine bottle—when it melts, it could trigger the collapse of a large portion of West Antarctica, equal to roughly 11 feet of global sea rise." ... "Winds are now pushing a layer of warm ocean water up underneath part of the glacier that extends out into the sea and melting it, faster and faster. If that part breaks off, the entire glacier would destabilize."

https://www.wired.com/story/antarctica-thwaites-glacier-brea... https://interactive.pri.org/2019/05/antarctica/thwaites-glac... https://interactive.pri.org/2019/05/antarctica/doomed-glacie...

"If" is the important word here.

If an asteroid hit we won't be just dealing with 10-12 feet.

Do you have any scientific proof that this will happen or that it's likely to happen?

Umm. Thwaites is indeed melting

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/07/02/1904822116

https://www.businessinsider.in/One-of-Antarcticas-biggest-gl...

Which is natural.

Hundreds of millions of refugees? Collapse of major ecosystems? Desertification? Flooding?

Demonstrated scientifically to happen over how long time, when and where?

It's in the IPCC reports, you can look it up.

No, it's not but thanks for kind of proving my point.

Scientifically demonstrated is not the same as speculated.

The effects of climate change are scientifically demonstrated in a similar way to evolution. We don't have a planet B for controlled experiments.

In other words speculated not demonstrated.

We do have economies B for controlled experiments and that data is pretty clear.

The richest countries are those who use the most energy to help them deal with nature.

Effects might happen depending on the temperature but we don't know which or how severe or when or if it will. We don't know how much humans affect it meaning that we don't know if it even make sense to do anything.

Evolution is not scientifically demonstrated. It's a way to interpret the data and observations from biology. It's the model that explains the best, but it's not in itself science just like climate science isn't science in any concise way but rather an interpretation of data.

It's that data which is being discussed and speculated about. We are very far from demonstrating even a fraction of what we speculate.

Modern physics is also just the model that best fits the data. By your criteria there is no science other than Mathematics.

Mathematics isn't science it's a tool used in science.

The most precise form of science we have is those that follow the scientific method ex. in physics where both theoretical claims and actual observations need to agree with each other plus predict the causality. And even here it's extremely hard to claim something is scientifically proven.

I am not sure what you mean with modern physics, can you be more concrete? What modern physics are just speculation and what does that have to do with the physics that isn't just speculation and theory?

Just because you believe a forthcoming climate catastrophe is real does not make it science in any meaningful way where we can talk about consensus and scientific predictions. You don't get a free pass to claim things just because you think the word as we know it might end.

Climate science is more akin to sociology or macroeconomics, i.e. a lot of speculation and interpretation and very little scientifically demonstrated foundation.

Literally all of science suffers from the problem of induction. So ultimately it's all just models that fit the data we have so far.

Climate science follows the scientific method too and stands on pretty solid foundations.

Climate science is interpretation of data, its not the data itself and even that data is highly varied in quality. In other words, its no a very precise form of science.

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