Comment by teslabox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teslabox | Hacker News Reader

Good analysis of the entrepreneurship in the energy sector. I might email him about this contradiction:

1. Consumers don’t care about energy

versus:

I don’t believe that we’ll get where we need to go without a global price on carbon. This is why I volunteer with the Citizens’ Climate Lobby to build political will for a national carbon fee and dividend policy in the US

Someone pointed out to me around 15 years ago that "green" is terrible branding for environmentalism.

Taxing carbon makes living more expensive for people. Most people on the margin will reject anything that makes energy more expensive for them. Dyslexic philosopher George W. Bush once said, "Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again."

People don't trust scientists, they trust engineers, because engineers own up to their mistakes and usually make a second-generation product that's better than the first edition, whereas 'science advances one funeral at a time' (the standard paraphrase of Max Planck).

The vast majority of people absolutely 100% do not care about their carbon output. They care about their wallets and quality of life. Advocating for carbon taxes is an exercise in futility, encouraged by artificial fear. IMHO, climate alarmism is propagated by people with good intentions and incomplete analysis of reconstructed data. Scientists have only recently put temperature sensors on the Juan de Fuca volcanic ridge, there's no sensors on the vast majority of the ocean ridges, and only in the last... ~40 years have they started to put fleets of automated temperature buoys into the oceans... We've had a mild winter where I live, but Baghdad Iraq had atypical snowfall this month [0].

[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/02/11/baghdad...

But I feel more and more that we’re approaching the point at which technology has gone about as far as it can within the confines of a 20th century policy regime.

The 20th century brought us the electric utility model, which encouraged the economy to develop to use as much energy as possible.

Humanity's best hope is not figuring out how to de-carbonize the economy, but to finish the Book of Physics and figure out where all the energy is hiding. Nikola Tesla promised us it's out there. 21st Century physics is tiptoeing towards an answer.

> The vast majority of people absolutely 100% do not care about their carbon output. They care about their wallets and quality of life.

This. The abject failure of airlines' "pay an extra $XX on your ticket to offset the carbon emissions of your flight" showed that the vast majority of people are virtue-signalling about climate change but not prepared to make any actual changes to their lifestyle for it.

I've had arguments with "green" friends about their use of cars (I haven't owned a car for >10 years - I prefer walking/cycling). They care desperately about the planet, but they care more about not losing the convenience of their personal car.

I notice the emphasis has shifted recently onto regulation of polluting industries, such as oil companies. I think this is in part because of the complete failure to change people's lifestyles. It's easier to regulate 100 large companies than get 1 billion people to accept responsibility for their lifestyle. But it'll be interesting to see what happens when those companies pass the cost of that regulation onto their customers.

I wonder how much of the failure to sell carbon credits is from the positioning (in x-y screen space and in t) alongside “pay extra for a seat near the front?”, “pay extra to check a bag?”, “pay extra to sit near your family?”, “pay extra for trip insurance?”, “pay extra for WiFi?” and other nibbles at the wallet while you have it out?

I’m also skeptical that these sold carbon offsets actually result in any actual marginal change in the world, but I think it’s more the choice fatigue and feeling of being one more way to be nickel and dimed...

This is exactly what gives me pause when paying these credits offered by the airline. I wonder if we could charge by total weight of passengers and luggage as that directly correlates to fuel usage.

It correlates but the weight to fuel usage is highly non-linear. The airplane I fly goes only 2-3% faster when it’s 10% lighter (at a constant cruise power setting, meaning the through the air economy only increases by 1/5 to 1/3 the change in mass).

Yes, which is why the companies promote passing the buck on to consumers rather than backing effective regulation. I'm reminded of cafe chains that give you 5p off a coffee if you use a reusable cup because they just love the environment so much but then lobby against imposing the same 5p charge via taxation. This is why the emphasis has shifted. Consumers already have to consider when buying a product without investigating its entire supply chain.

There's an obvious public goods problem here. My personal emissions have no measurable effect on the climate. I could reduce my emissions to nothing and I won't see a difference. If everybody else pitched in, I could personally do nothing and the climate would still be saved. Either way, the outcome is the same whether I help or not, so my incentive is to do nothing.

That's why your friends haven't reduced their personal emissions, but probably support policy changes that would incentivize mass changes in behavior. It's the same reason we can't rely on voluntary donations to build the roads, but people support taxes for them.

I get that, but these are "green" people who demonstrate at rallies for climate change, etc. Of all the people I would expect to "be the change they want in the world", it would be these, at least according to their FB posts.

I wasn't popular for pointing out the irony when at least a few of them drove to a demonstration against a new refinery.

<edited for grammar>

> I wasn't popular for pointing out the irony when at least a few of them drove to a demonstration against a new refinery.

So...they should've walked or biked to protests instead? What if (as refineries often are) it was 100 miles away in a rural area with no public transportation? What about disabled people? People without enough free time to bike 100 (or maybe even 10) miles? People with children?

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Would it be better to have no rallies at all, rather than rallies that people drive to? These people spent their free time going to rallies instead of motorboating on lakes or flying on a jet to go skiing. They have skin in the game.

Effective change requires shifting the system. Personal choices for coffee cups, cars, etc are largely irrelevant besides wrangling your own guilt.

A actual change needed for airlines is to tax airlines at the cost of emissions and pollution they produce and have produced historically. This can be analyzed down to the supply chain level - how much does it cost to build, how much pollution is produced in the process. How much wetlands have been damaged by airfields, etc.

I'd disagree that there is a contradiction between consumers caring about energy, and the author's view that a carbon price is a key tool for carbon reduction. They are two very different things. One is end consumers and their monthly bills and the other is business level market economics.

There was a lot of buzz about smart meters for electricity, with some very optimistic thinking that once people saw their daily usage they would reduce that usage. That didn't work, and we agree at least here that most people don't think about the cost of plugging in a phone to charge or doing some cooking, these are essentials for their life and they'll do them anyway.

On an industry level, with trading of carbon credits and guarantees of origin we're seeing significant financial and brand benefits for companies in carbon reduction and policies do have significant effects.

We're seeing another market force affecting company's climate policies, which might end up being more than government policies and carbon trading, which the author hasn't mentioned. Hedge funds, banks and investors are favouring companies with ecological policies, or ceasing to find those with high negative ecological impacts.

These are all very real impacts, being made now, are the speed of implementation looks to be increasing. All based on a massive scientific consensus that anecdotes and minor objections do not outweigh. "figuring out where all the energy is hiding" can happen in parallel, and indeed is, but so far there's are no real world solutions that will deliver the energy we need or reduce our ecological impact in the short & medium terms.

> we agree at least here that most people don't think about the cost of plugging in a phone to charge

We agree because it’s smaller than they should care about.

Even at 50% socket to battery efficiency and $0.20/kWh electricity, completely charging a 10-15Wh battery costs under a penny.

I won’t bend over to pick up a clean but wet penny off the sidewalk, let alone go without a charged phone to save a penny.

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