Comment by xoa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xoa | Hacker News Reader

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Do we really need radical economic changes to deal with pollution versus just plain properly using the effective systems we've got by internalizing the cost? One of the fundamental foundations of Free Markets as tools is to have pricing at each step include costs, and I don't agree that failure to do that means the entire thing must be tossed. On the contrary, I suspect it's a lowest common barrier scenario, that if such a relatively simple thing can't be accomplished by societies why would vastly more difficult and ambitious efforts be successful?

Really, global warming at least is a pretty much perfect scenario for market solutions, because it's simultaneously a vastly distributed problem and also can be attacked from anywhere in the world (since greenhouse gases naturally disperse evenly worldwide). Just set the price of emitting/extracting a ton of CO2/equivalent at the price of industrially removing it plus some minimum margin (5-7%). Make the latter a ratcheting auction system, completely revenue-neutral to the government, and countries that don't comply internally can have conservative worst case carbon internalization tariffs applied. Then just leave the markets to sort out the best ways to meet that goal. Everything almost instantly becomes carbon neutral, no need for any sort of moralizing about what luxuries are more important, everyone can just see the real prices and decide accordingly where they want to allocate their resources. And as carbon capture becomes large scale and mature, it'll be cheaper to then go negative carbon and reverse the problem.

I'm worried a lot of the feelings-based efforts and attempts to mix in huge revolutions are extremely counter productive to dealing with AGW specifically. Yes, there are lots of other major inequalities and systemic problems that desperately need addressing. But AGW is such a huge controversial deal riders should really, really be minimized. Fundamentally asking that economics be honest and properly account for costs shouldn't be as big an ask as a lot of other things, and it genuinely is for all of our benefit too. If measures like "GDP" are distorted based on externalities, the first thing to do should be un-distort them shouldn't it?

I think what you’re describing constitutes a “radical economic change” unfortunately. I think it’s still a good idea and overall productive approach to price in externalities as taxes, but there’s pretty significant opposition to this in the US, to take one example.

There is a huge problem with pricing externalities as taxes because those who are harmed are not compensated, the cost of the externalities should paid to those who are harmed. This requires better understanding of property rights and measurements - if you want to pollute the air then those effected have to sell you the right -- that would be the ideal solution instead of the government taking more money out of the economy for it's uses.

The system you describe is the government. The government would tax it and then redistribute the revenue to the communities of those affected, if that’s what we decided was most important. The state is the mechanism through which groups of individuals take action in public.

> The government would tax it and then redistribute the revenue to the communities of those affected, if that’s what we decided was most important.

That's also problematic because CO2 acts globally - and you don't really want to give dictatorships of poor countries who are affected the most (e.g. Africa) a steady supply of money.

I was talking purely about domestic policy, just to clarify. In the US people in the southeast are most immediately affected by global warming, in the form of severe storms (incidentally states in the southeast are also already among the greatest recipients of federal aid, because of their high levels of poverty). On an international level there will need to be economic cooperation as well but it will look different because there isn’t a single sovereign to collect and distribute revenue. Typically such solutions focus on agreements to reduce tariffs in international trade provided certain conditions and such.

Usually this is paired with dividends paid equally to everyone. As you said we don’t have the sophistication to apply reimbursement fairly to those affected.

The yellow vest protests could be a sign of how this idea might fail, isn't it? The fuel tax increase was not accepted by the working class.

Any carbon emissions taxes would have to be phased in very gradually in order to give people enough time to adjust, such as by purchasing electric vehicles. Otherwise it will be impossible to maintain political support.

Truly universal CO2 tax would be OK with yellow vests.

Now the problem is that CO2 for cheap gasoline cars is taxed a lot. While CO2 for airplane fuel for better off to go on holidays is not. And they get tax credits to buy nice electric cars. Regressive taxation at it's best.

If you can quantify, roughly, such tax differences, you'll have the core of an unassailable argument.

Not meant to refute the GP argument but, in the US at the federal level the AvGas tax per gallon and gasoline tax per gallon are about the same ~ $0.19. This is probably one of those areas where subsidies and such obfuscate the reality.

Well, here in Illinois, a gallon of diesel fuel is 85 cents per gallon. An international flight to Hong Kong will take a little over 40,000 gallons (but is tax exempt), so 34000 dollars worth of taxes are not paid per flight.

Jet fuel isn't tax exempt - there are both federal and state taxes to be paid on it

International fuel is tax exempt.

I can find no data on that, and transoceanic flight have to fuel up at takeoff airport thus can't exploit lower taxes at home hub (commonly done with shorter range flights).

You don't need data, it simply is exempt and has been since 1947.

I used to fuel commercial flights in a previous and much better life. International jets used a special ticket that said INTL EXEMPT on them.

Yellow vest started with this, but is not just this. The subject was the tip of an iceberg, this iceberg being that a whole working class barely makes a living.

France is a welfare state, but we still have 10%-15% of people hit by poverty.

How is it acceptable in one of the leading economies of EU, and how is it freaking possible we still have this have this problem in the twenty-first century?

I only skimmed TFA, but it seems that it talk about this. Environment and social issues.

IMHO new statics won't change a thing. Political leaders are already aware of this.

I don't know about France, per se, but in most western nations, gasoline/petrol used by farmers is not taxed (or taxed much less) vs the same fuel used by industry or regular people. I suspect france was the same. The yellow vest protestors mostly originated from rural areas. It was, IMO, yet another example of the growing urban/rural divide.

The coronavirus halted a portion of world economic activity to a degree that could only be described as revolutionary or at least politically unthinkable. Yet global emissions have only slowed by a comparatively small amount. Clearly the market or even political approach is doomed, as only a form of carbon recapture or some other technology can fix the issues technology has created.

It’s not as disconnected as you might think. The pandemic is on track to cause a roughly ~7% drop in emissions for 2020. And (depending on the ever changing forecast) something like ~5-7% drop in global GDP for 2020.

So the link and magnitude appears pretty strong and the results appear pretty much expected. We know how to do this.

One: stop the emissions by switching to renewables and nuclear, and away from fossil fuels for transport.

Two: drawdown the carbon we’ve already emitted (and will emit during the transition in One above) through reforestation, rebuilding wetlands, building new carbon sinks, and carbon capture.

The market and a political approach are the only solution. How else are you going to institute the subsidies and taxes and government scale infrastructure and environmental programs.

The point I'm trying to make is that the fact that all of these unsustainable, revolutionary changes only generated a 7% drop indicates a few things:

-For political change to be effective, it would have to completely change how the economy functions, and essentially turn into some sort of WWII total war mode where almost all actors are focused on the same outcome, except many more countries have to be corralled together this time

-The market might produce the technology we need, but it would have to be black swan level good for it to have an impact, otherwise we are looking at investments in infrastructure so massive that we will need the total war mode described above anyway

I don't want to extrapolate too much from a single figure, but that 7% did indeed shatter many of my previously held beliefs. A complete revolution in the way things work for only 7%! I can't emphasize how disturbing that is. We have an albeit limited but at least hard datapoint that the current mindset is doomed. In a technical sense, it will indeed be a market and political approach but it will be so different from what most people mean with this phrase (i.e. carbon taxes will fix it, let's just carry on as usual but more carefully) that it's no longer a meaningful conversation

What revolution? I-280 still has traffic jams at 3 PM, people are still buying stuff, just through Amazon and DoorDash rather than going to their neighborhood store. Sure, people staying in helps a bit, but given that the changes we made were to keep people away from each other and not actually specifically reduce their emissions (in many cases we are being more "wasteful") it's not surprising that the drop is only 7%.

I get what you’re saying but 1) as shocking as the past year may be it hasn’t really been all that revolutionary. Some portion of people got shifted to working from home, but just about nothing else changed. And 2) there isn’t all that much about moving away from fossil fuels that’s going to look revolutionary. It will look pretty boring to most people. The idea that it’ll take a revolution is IMO a bit of fear mongering by vested interests.

Things like decarbonizing an electricity grid have been done before, France did it in the 80s. It wasn’t revolutionary. You wouldn’t have noticed except the air was cleaner.

Things like converting transport to non fossil fuels are already in progress and there’s nothing revolutionary looking about it. An electric car isn’t revolutionary it looks and (mostly) drives like a regular car. An electric train isn’t revolutionary, it’s already the norm for decades in most places.

Planting trees or restoring wetlands isn’t revolutionary. It’s just trees and wetlands.

Even carbon extraction is going to look pretty uninteresting to most people if it happens.

The only thing that will be revolutionary is what will happen if we don’t do these things soon enough.

> Just set the price of emitting/extracting a ton of CO2/equivalent at the price of industrially removing it plus some minimum margin (5-7%)

Emitting or extracting? The two are radically different and done in different countries. And how in both cases do you deal with simple but massive cheating?

> countries that don't comply internally can have conservative worst case carbon internalization tariffs applied

I look forward to some future US administration trying to impose tariffs on Saudi Arabia and a sheik turning up saying "Your campaign. How much?" and writing a bribe for a couple of billion dollars.

It's never as easy as it sounds to "just" do something. I'm hugely in favor of the carbon tax you've described, but it will not be easy to enact it globally.

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