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A bunch of environmentalists are idiots. But that doesn’t mean there’s no sensible plan or that it’s all speculative. In economics carbon’s costs have a name: they impose an externality on others.

The standard remedy for an externality is a tax. So, to address climate change you would:

1. Institute a tax on carbon

2. Work through an international framework like the UN or WTO to have other countries also institute this tax, and to levy tariffs on any countries that don’t.

3. Since carbon is taxed, you can lower other, less efficient taxes such as the income tax, which is a drag on productivity.

4. You can also redistribute some of the money to compensate the poor for the effective tax increase. For instance this is how canada deals with its sales tax.

There are other coherent plans but that’s a big one. Had we implemented thus tax 50 years ago, the effects would have been:

* energy efficiency is encouraged in production as there is a higher cost

* other forms of energy such as nuclear and hydro gain an advantage

* There would have been more capital available for researching other alternatives such as solar

* The economy would have remained good due to the benefits of a sharply lower income tax

Environmentalists tend to be rather bad at math and not good at thinking through economics or evaluating tradeoffs. Because everyone else abandoned the field, they produced the most prominent (and wrong headed) solutions.

But with gradual economically sensible action 50 years ago, we could have been in for a very soft landing. We could have still used fossil fuels too! They were pretty necessary, but the system I outlined would have nudged us towards a different energy base.

This sounds like a very good plan. The best part of it is that a single country can institute it on it’s own - just start taxing products and imports by carbon! A big enough country could move the needle, and encourage others to take action.

Instead, the only actual ideas that actual people actually propose are 100% braindead.

Ban meat (lol), ban nuclear (lol lol), ban plastic straws (lol lol lol), ...

This style of argumentation is chilling the discussion. Please stop with the ad hominems.

There are many overlapping problems, not only climate change. It's complex. Partial solutions are still solutions. They are just incomplete

I disagree. I think that partial solutions (or, in cases I listed above, anti-solutions) steal the enthusiasm from real solutions. Giving people the ego-boost and emotional satisfaction of solving the problem, but actually making it worse.

Perhaps we can agree to disagree without being derogatory to each other.

You will continue to see things in black and white "the problem", "real solutions".

I will continue to see a mosaic of overlapping issues.

Sorry, no disrespect meant to you personally. I just ridicule and disrespect bad ideas.

Alright. But please be aware that it is possible to chill discussion through stridency. I don't believe this applies only to me.

the ideas aren't bad though, you just don't agree with them. Banning meat isn't something I would get on board with but it would probably be effective. There's been a lot of discussion lately on HN about nuclear and I can actually see both sides of the debate. Plastic straws I think you have actually just strawmanned environmentalists here as I've never seen plastic straws mentioned as a solution or contributor to global warming.

While I agree in principle with what you're putting forward, I think there are a couple of huge obstacles. One, good luck convincing politicians to sacrifice their projects to make room for #3. I understand the carbon tax would be more efficient, but in the short term there would a be a revenue loss, and most politicians would only care about that. Two, Without #3, the whole thing is a non-starter. It's a lofty academic idea that fits well into a forum like this; but without #3 happening, it boils down to "give me more of your money and I promise we'll fix it!", which is an unacceptable argument for lots of Americans (myself included, to be frank).

I personally hold that the best and most realistic solution is a headfirst, committed dive into nuclear energy.

Not obvious why #3 is impossible. You can forecast revenue changes from a carbon tax and revenue losses from an income tax, set rates accordingly, and adjust as you go. This is especially feasible if you have a 50 year timeframe.

Should be quite feasible to make it revenue neutral and this rob no politician of their project.

Nuclear would have been great 50 years ago! My argument is that the project I outlined above would have given market based incentive to make nuclear competitive.

If level headed people of all stripes had focussed on the problem it would have been solveable.

(Since I can’t edit my comment above, I should add for posterity: obviously not all environmentalists are bad at math or systems thinking, and some of them had sensible solutions. But we would have had better solutions if others joined too)

First off, simply because you don't like the people that support a position doesn't mean that position is incorrect.

And overpopulation? Um... because draconian population control tactics and policies are evil? China's one child policy was unconscionable.

German energy is costly not due to production costs, but instead due to taxes on energy utilization in general to subsidize a more rapid transition to environmentally sound energy. Other countries, i.e. France, have chosen to lower costs substantially. (France is unwise, IMHO. Lower costs increases utilization which offsets carbon gains, see rebound effects [0]. Germany is doing the right thing) [1]

Nuclear: Has always been on the table. Environmentalists are not a unified block. The Gates foundation is substantially funding nuclear.

Most of what you think of as "environmental support" is actually funding from petroleum based business. The whole personal recycling movement? paid for by the petroleum industry. [2]

Finally, the petroleum industry hired the exact same goons that the tobacco industry did to peddle pseudoscientific nonsense. [3]

There are coherent, comprehensive, effective plans for fighting climate change. You are just unlikely to hear about in the news because they are deeply wonky. There are paths out, they are neither easy (there will be losers) nor simple (it's a complex system).

However, most of what we hear are the voices of very, very, very rich and powerful oil industries trying to muddy the waters. And lets be clear: they will be the losers, if the rest of us have any hope of not either having to bear terrible austerity or the horrors of climate change.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/05...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

[3] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tobacco-and-oil-i...

"However, most of what we hear are the voices of very, very, very rich and powerful oil industries trying to muddy the waters."

I'm shocked, shocked by your suggestion that bad actors would conduct disinformation campaigns to discredit and neutralize inconvenient truths.

What is shocking is that they play both sides.

It’s a well known phenomenon that if you give people a small, concrete thing that they have agency over, i.e. recycling their cans, even though that thing is next to useless in terms of systemic change, they will be less likely to support broad based, effective system legislation.

The bad actors pretend to be “environmental” in order to muddy the waters, sap support for actual change, and paint the entirety of the movement as ridiculous by funding outspoken lunatics.

It’s straight out of Putin’s playbook. [0] Putin funds “anti-Putin” organizations, but only ones that are absurd and implausibly idealistic. Those likely to offend other Russians.

[0] https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2012/05/31/putins-propaganda-m...

Ya, frankly, the effectiveness of propaganda scares me, deeply. How do I know what I know, with any certainty, if I'm so easily manipulated.

The exploitation of our cognitive "loopholes" is the best case against Freedom Speeches™. Paraphrasing: We're not rationale, so countering falsehoods with truthiness simply cannot work.

The only legal mitigation I can think of is authenticate (optionally) speech. Just like the authenticity facets of the replication crisis. Meaning show your data, cite your sources, sign your works. And then maybe over time our culture learns to discount anything unsourced and unsigned.

>scale back our lifestyle

Low-carbon-footprint urban lifestyle doesn't feel "scaled back." If anything it feels scaled up, intense, high maintenance, premium. Something for wild and rambunctious twenty-somethings. It leaves people yearning to settle down in "the simple life" with a big lawn, a big SUV, and a big steak on the grill.

It feels pretty much the same, except there's no second car.

The first problem is that housing stock takes a lot of modification to get to modern energy usage (essentially, 0 joules after construction). We haven't started down that road in any serious way as a society, even though the technology is commercial and past early-adopter pricing. But living in that house, it's no different to living in any other nice house -- a McMansion has a big reception hall, my passive solar house has a airlock/mudroom -- that's not a difference in lifestyle, just in detail.

The second problem is transport. At a personal level this might mean EVs, except that they are so very expensive. You might afford to replace one of the family's cars, but not all of them. Public transport would appear to be an alternative, but if you don't have access to that already, then the build time for that is over a decade. So there's going to be an uncomfortable interim of, say, twenty years. Which I suspect will be filled with bikes and e-bikes, as adding bike lanes and bikeways are minor projects. There are times when your description of personal transport as "scaled up" is very true.

There are many small annoyances from being slightly ahead of the bulk of the population. But one of the things Covid-19 has done has been to make local government is far more open to change: they've flipped from sending me letters about my vegetable garden in my front yard, to asking me if I'd be happy for their staff to tour it and collect ideas.

To start, implement a carbon tax and more appropriately cost current goods.

let people prioritize what things they find important

Ok, but do you think there needed to be a misinformation campaign led by devious ne'er-do-wells to make raising taxes unpopular?

That is a mechanism to achieve the goals of the environmental movement. Not a reason to achieve the goals of the environmentalists, or an argument that it is the best path.

> Ok, but do you think there needed to be a misinformation campaign led by devious ne'er-do-wells to make raising taxes unpopular?

The only sensible implementation of a carbon tax is the one in which all of the money is refunded to the population.

A program that causes everybody to get ~$1000 while only paying ~$500 in taxes because large corporations are responsible for the majority of carbon emissions would seem to be very popular, absent a misinformation campaign, since the average person would net ~$500 (out of the pockets of Exxon et al).

Squint and Canada's carbon tax dividend looks like UBI. Win / win.

Why push 1 child policy in Africa? Start with USA, where the pollution per person ratio is much higher.

Probably because the US is already on the trajectory towards 1. The birthrate today is at an all time low of 1.73 in the US. In Africa it is currently 4.6.

Fully industrialized countries already have declining birth rates and modest populations. Having more kids in places with fewer resources isn't a sustainable proposition. If you have a stable rather than exploding population, it's much easier for that population to raise its standards of living in a sustainable way.