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Comment by thecoffman | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised to see the comments here are overwhelmingly positive. Usually I feel like the hacker community tends to have a somewhat libertarian bent in a lot of ways, but I guess not here? I don't particularly understand why the government needs to step in and do this. If we've reached the peak oil inflection point by that time as some of the commenters here have speculated, would that not force essentially the same action anyways by driving the price of gas sky high? Additionally, it would provide a gigantic monetary incentive for whichever companies want to pursue alternative fuel sources. To me this seems to be something that will be sorted out by the market in time, rather than forced at the barrel of a government gun.

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> To me this seems to be something that will be sorted out by the market in time, rather than forced at the barrel of a government gun.

The purpose of this type of legislation is to save the planet Earth from our polluting ways. What if peak oil never happens for some reason? Are you just going to sit there and let rich people pump out poisonous gasses?! For hundreds of years?

No! Let's say that again. NO! Even the most intense libertarians must realize that if there is zero financial incentive to help out the Earth, perhaps government intervention is a very smart way of going.

If we know that we're changing our atmosphere so quickly and so negatively (for us and our fellow animals, anyway) and it's cheaper to keep doing it, you already know humans will keep doing it unless it becomes illegal.

Legislation is necessary and good here.

I think you are using the wrong vocabulary for libertarians.

This legislation is more about climate change than about peak oil. It is possible that peak oil hits just when we also want to limit our CO2 emissions but the two are unrelated. (Some non-libertarians would probably add that peak oil is also a good reason for legislation, they will say that without it the transition will be very rough, too rough to be handled only by the market. But that’s only non-libertarians.)

There are no incentives for individuals or companies to change their behavior because of climate change. It’s a good old tragedy of the commons. The incentives have to be created outside of the market and a typical way to do that is through legislation.

Here are the three assumptions that might lead even a libertarian to support such legislation:

1. Climate change is an example of the tragedy of the commons and doesn’t create (enough) incentives for individuals or companies to change their behavior.

2. It is possible to create such incentives through legislation and the proposed legislation is a good way to do that.

3. The costs of climate change are lower than the costs of preventing or slowing down climate change.

Those are also the three assumptions (and there might be more but I think the list is pretty complete) you have to argue against if you do not support this legislation.

Libertarianism is about liberty, not about optimising statistics like "the cost of climate change" (whatever that's supposed to mean).

The climate will change. That's completely natural and I can't see a reason to stop it (honestly I think it's impossible). Humans and other animals will just adapt and the evolution will continue.

> The climate will change. That's completely natural and I can't see a reason to stop it (honestly I think it's impossible). Humans and other animals will just adapt and the evolution will continue.

This is a very weird paragraph. Forgive me if I don't understand properly, but let's look at this carefully:

> The climate will change. That's completely natural

The climate does change naturally. It also changes due to artificial reasons (unless you consider human pollution to be natural, but that's just word semantics. For now, lets call human-caused climate change "artificial").

So no this is not completely natural. Our activities have had intense repercussions on our planet's climate in a very artificial way.

> and I can't see a reason to stop it

Really? You can't see any reason at all? If we don't stop polluting and heating up the planet, it's possible that hundreds of millions of people will suffer and perhaps die. Worst case scenarios have terrible food shortages and awful fresh water problems as rain patterns shift and change. Even if none of this happens there is absolutely that risk. How can you say that you see no reason to stop the human-caused climate change?

> (honestly I think it's impossible).

This makes zero sense to me. We started changing our climate a long time ago and didn't even notice. We're still changing it now. What makes you think it's "impossible" to start going the other way? Dude, we can drive electric cars on the moon. We can develop technologies to help regulate our climate here on Earth just fine.

> Humans and other animals will just adapt and the evolution will continue.

Not so fast. While evolution will definitely continue, there already are mass extinctions happening due to climate change. We're changing things far faster than most species can react to, far faster than evolution can handle.

Life on Earth will most certainly continue and evolve for many millions of years into the future. But at what cost? We don't need to kill off millions of species just 'cause it's cheaper to burn fuel than use other methods.

Let's try to keep as many currently-alive species going as long as we can, yeah? What's the harm in that?

Your reaction to the risks you've mentioned looks like panic. Maximal possible damage doesn't matter. A meteorite hitting the Earth would definitely cause enormous damage but is very unlikely to happen. What matters is the expected value of the damage. What are the numbers in the case of climate change?

I really don't think that trying to preserve as many species as possible is a rational goal. It causes economical harm for example. What's wrong with extinctions?

I often hear about the costs of climate change. What I don't hear about is:

1. possible benefits; what we should assess is benefits - costs, not costs alone,

2. possible benefits and costs of so called solutions. For example introducing electric cars will increase demand for batteries and electricity. That means increased demand for coal, gas or nuclear power. What will be the effects of these?

I'm just very skeptical about models of so complex systems. My skepticism is increased by the involvement of politics and the hype around the topic.

> What's wrong with extinctions?

We eat a lot of animals. If you mess with this complex system in weird ways like changing the climate, it seems possible that some of the animals we eat will lose their happy place in the food chain.

That's a reason to care and a reason to try and not dramatically and immediately shift the Earth's climate.

> 1. possible benefits

Some places will get more rain. They might like that. The rest of us might get a lot less rain...that would suck. Right now, people live where it rains. If it starts raining in different places...well, that's going to cause trouble.

(The rain is an example. There are obviously other examples.)

> 2. possible benefits and costs of so called solutions. For example introducing electric cars will increase demand for batteries and electricity. That means increased demand for coal, gas or nuclear power. What will be the effects of these?

Long term, this is far far better. Even if these electric cars are powered by dirty coal. The amount of electricity used to power an electric car pollutes far, far less than a gas car per miles driven.

But ideally we'd move towards wind, solar, nuclear, etc to make these options even better.

If you are scared or upset at the future using solar energy and you don't know what the effects are, will you at least agree that it's likely a much better move than burning things?

Your skepticism could be healthy, but I think you are too skeptical and that is damaging your ability to rationally think about our fragile Earth.

The extraction of oil is quite damaging to the environment. The use of oil causes damage to the environment. Oil is the cause of some wars, corruption, and extensive environmental damage in some countries. There is no inherent right to use oil. There is no inherent right to do as we please to the environment. At least, not in many peoples' perception.

The climate will change. Do we want to speed it along? Do we want to adapt to the changing climate with toxins in the water and ground? I don't and thankfully many others share my opinion. I do not believe we are at liberty to do as we please to the environment and it is proper for society to intervene through its government.

I don’t think that libertarianism is a suicide pact. Sure, if the costs of climate change are minimal many libertarians won’t accept legislation limiting their freedom but I’m pretty sure that position changes as soon as a somewhat large amount of loss of life is predicted.

Your second paragraph challenges assumption three: “The costs of climate change are lower than the costs of preventing or slowing down climate change.” It’s consequently no wonder that you disagree with the policy – pretty much anyone who disagrees with assumption three can be expected to be against this legislation, independent of her or his other political views.

You are basically saying that the costs of slowing or stopping climate change will be infinite (it will be impossible) or at least extremely high, at any rate higher than the costs of climate change itself.

I do see where you're coming from - and I tentatively agree except on two points

if there is zero financial incentive to help out the Earth

I would argue that there's a HUGE financial incentive. The company/person that comes up with the "next big thing" in fuel sources is going to be incomprehensibly wealthy - I think that much is clear.

and it's cheaper to keep doing it

I think supply and demand almost guarantees that it will not always been cheaper. Maybe not on an acceptable timeline, but, its obvious that at some point it will become prohibitively expensive to continue to use fossil fuels.

I also feel like your rich people reference is sort of a catch-all FUD argument. Oh no, those terrible rich people are causing all the problems. There are plenty of people on this very forum that are probably rich by most standards. Surprisingly, that doesn't make them faceless evil monsters.

>I would argue that there's a HUGE financial incentive. The company/person that comes up with the "next big thing" in fuel sources is going to be incomprehensibly wealthy - I think that much is clear.

the economical analysis shows that nuclear fusion energy wouldn't be cheaper than the price of coal's energy [4c/kwt], thus without government intervention like carbon emissions pricing and explicit forcing of phasing out of fossil fuels this type of energy is out of question. The arithmetic is similar for other alternative sources as well.

As supply of carbon based fuels dwindles, their price will go up. The fact that carbon based fuels are currently cheaper than any alternative backs my argument. As soon as they aren't cheaper - the market will shift.

>As soon as they aren't cheaper - the market will shift.

or there wouldn't be any market anymore. It is also possible that they will be cheaper for centuries to come - the amount of coal and oil reachable in the next 50-100 years just isn't known. And the higher the price, the less demand, thus the less the price - the free-market behavior which has kept the price of oil pretty stable since WWII. Instead of flying cars [more fuel consumption] people of San Francisco are biking. As a result we have civilization developed into Facebook instead of homes on Mars [the last statement is (C) of another HN commenter]

It is plain stupid for the human race to sit and wait until the price of oil will go up instead of stimulating development of new technologies [some of which can carry us at least to closest planets].

<i>I would argue that there's a HUGE financial incentive.</i> <i>I think supply and demand almost guarantees that it will not always been cheaper.</i>

And these two contradictory statements show that the free market cannot save the planet on its own.

How are those contradictory?

There's a huge financial incentive for discovering the next big thing precisely because carbon based fuels will not always be cheapest - One leads into to the other.

Also - if you surround text with asterisks you'll get italics.

Ah thanks. I guess what I mean is that most truly world-shattering discoveries are driven by heavy amounts of funding from national governments. Private industry might build an electric car that is affordable for the masses, but it isn't going to discover something as long-term or pie in the sky as nuclear fusion. I just don't see them spending the time, effort, and money on that sort of research.

This is something that cannot be sorted by the market without regulation. The problem is that most of the costs incurred by driving in a city centre are incurred by people other than the driver: the pollution, noise, risk of death to pedestrians, the vast amount of space required by roads & parking lots, the massive number of dollars required to build & maintain these roads, et cetera. The driver pays for none of that. If your driver paid a dollar or two per mile to cover these externalities, suddenly there would be very few drivers. With very few drivers, those massive streets suddenly become very valuable underused property and would quickly become repurposed.

That's true to a certain extent: many of the costs are indeed incurred by people other than the driver. By no means all of the costs, though. I'm sitting in Starbucks in central London right now (heading to the London Clojure Dojo in a few minutes :-). I got here by train and on the tube and I wouldn't dream of driving here. Looking out of the window, most of the vehicles that I see are buses and taxis, with very few private cars in evidence. It looks like a lot of people agree with me and wouldn't dream of driving here.

In my experience, many of the world's big cities have already driven private cars away (at least from the centre) and replaced them with an efficient public transportation system. Cities such as New York to Melbourne to Hong Kong are similar. The reason is that the driver really does pay a cost, being stuck in a traffic jam. If the public transportation system is good enough then it's an easy choice not to drive.

Of course, London already changes motorists to drive in the centre of the city so maybe that tips the balance even further away from car drivers.

Libertarian city probably wouldn't have a petrol cars from the beginning, because with exhaust you aggress against others property and you should have a permit from all of them for polluting their property. And it's hard to get all that permits without a government, who forbid to sue the polluters in the name of progress :)

Not to mention the question of who would build and maintain the roads...

Ecolibertarianism. Green minarchism. Okay, someone get started on this ideology, I wanna see how this plays out.

This is such an easy straw-man target that will keep tons of politicians appearing to be busy and working on something really important. It will win them votes and by the time it actually starts to work nobody would really care about it anymore (because of what you say).

Isn't it a dream thing if you are a politician?

I agree with you. I live in Europe and I'm sick with news like this. I would consider myself a fan of electric cars. I'm sure I'll be getting one within the next 10 years. I don't need no one forcing me. They are simply better cars.

If Government want's to force me, please ask me (through vote) and give it at least some amount of legitimacy.

I haven't even seen the legislation for this, but as we europeans get more accostomed to the EU, we figure out we just have to deal with what Brussels say. It just pops off somewhere deep in the news.

And by making it a 40 year projection, they take out the urgency for people to react, knowing that in 20 years it has gained ligitimacy because no one had spoken out against it for so long. It's smooth dictatorship, but still dictatorship.

I think I'm getting why Americans always complain about Washington. But I think Brussels is even worse. Picture an American Union where legislation gets passed by some Bureau in Panama and other locations that were chosen by this Bureau on behalf of which regions need to be subsidized through Armies of public officials.

I've often wondered about this. What would happen, were we to exhaust our petroleum resources?

What concerns me, is that petroleum has many uses, fuel being the main one. By restraining petroleum use as an energy source, we could keep using it for other purposes, such as deriving petrochemicals (plastics in particular).

Now, some might say that plastics and other petroleum products are bad for the environment, and should be replaced / avoided. I'm no petrochemical expert, and I don't know much about the alternatives, but I think plastics still have some important uses in many field, and I'm not sure how feasible it is to do without them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrochemical http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_products

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