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Comment by dimes | Hacker News Reader

The alternative methods of transport will be more expensive, which will lead to a decrease in demand.

Yeah, I’ll just not drive to work...

This has never been true for consumers. The only “demand” it impacts are companies, who then move their jobs to China where they can use coal powered plants.

There is no world where this artificial increase in prices is good.

Green energy is improving, nuclear is improving. It’s improving because it has to compete with alternatives, like oil. Green energy is not cheap or widespread enough today for consumers or industry. So it’s only the people of the country that lose.

This has always been true of consumers.

- Let's buy a smaller/more efficient car instead of the bigger/less efficient one

- Let's move closer to work

- Let's carpool

- Let's not buy our teenager a car just yet

Etc, etc. Cost of ownership effects all sorts of choices, always has, always will.

I was wondering, just for the effect, if i could translate this list into the world of computers

-Buy smaller/more efficient computers instead of the bigger/less efficient one

-let's move closer to work

-let's share computers

-let's not buy our teenagers a computer just yet

Feels strange to read. But ok, who knows, maybe compu, umm, smartphones fall out of favour some day as well.

From a consumer perspective

- Cheaper phones, they're just slower

- Lower resolution videos and images, less data, less cpu cost.

- Single shared desktop instead of everyone having a laptop

- Literally the same

---

From a business/software eng perspective

- Less compute, let things take longer.

- More efficient programming languages. Simplify problems (e.g. use aggregate statistics instead of working on the whole data set).

- Timesharing on servers

- Pen and paper for people who don't really need one? Don't buy the delivery driver a computer, just tell them where to go? This one is hard to make a business analogy out of.

We do that stuff.

> -Buy smaller/more efficient computers instead of the bigger/less efficient one

Smaller process size and better power management makes your mobile device have better battery life. 80 Plus, energy star, performance-per-watt benchmarks.

> -let's move closer to work

Hughesnet and dial-up are not good WFH options.

> -let's share computers

Cloud, client/server.

> -let's not buy our teenagers a computer just yet

Cancelled Instagram-for-kids?

> -Buy smaller/more efficient computers instead of the bigger/less efficient one

I've run laptop cpu based desktops instead of desktop cpus (chromebox, nuc, lots of similar products with less known branding). It probably makes a difference, especially it you have a dedicated GPU in the desktop. Max power is certainly reduced, usually idle power too, for raw compute tasks there's a balance because the tasks will take longer and maybe end up using similar power. For games and stuff, you'll get way less fps (or lower settings, or realistically both), but use less power if you play the same amount of time.

> -let's move closer to work

I dunno how much power difference this makes.

> -let's share computers

I've done this, one at a time limits max power consumption, but may lead to higher utilization. Multiple monitors and keyboard/mice is an option too, but more fiddly. Maybe a little power savings vs two desktops, but it worked better with two gpus, so maybe not.

> -let's not buy our teenagers a computer just yet

This is kind of like the sharing one earlier.

That’s my point, you should always try to do what benefits your people (as a leader). Idk what this is, it’s just disproportionately negatively impacting the poor and middle class.

At the same time, this forces jobs over seas and Biden lets Russia build a pipeline to Europe limiting the USAs ability to sell and compete. Literally none of this is helping the environment or the citizens he leads.

I'm just addressing this part "This has never been true for consumers. The only “demand” it impacts are companies", it's wrong, it does impact demand from consumers, substantially.

Whether impacting consumer demand is a net positive for the population (due to climate change) or net negative for the population (because it's preventing useful stuff) isn't something I really want to weigh in on on the internet, I don't hold strong enough or well supported enough opinions.

If you work with information, there is no fundamental reason to live close to "work". It is much more efficient to live where you want to live as there is no need to travel - you are already there.

Yep. Americans used to drive enormous boat sized cars, then suddenly a lot of people liked these small Japanese cars.

I wonder why that happened????

I, a consumer, chose to live in a place where I could get to work without a car (and not having to drive was an explicit part of my decision-making). Consumers make this kind of choice all the time. That not every consumer can choose not to drive doesn't mean the idea of trying to influence consumer behavior is unreasonable.

This has never been true for consumers.

Well thats just not true. People make decisions about what to drive and how to drive it and how far to drive it based on the price of gas.

Why not tax the pipeline to simulate that cost increase? Isn't that the best of all worlds?

that pipeline that now will never exist was substantially owned by the Canadian and ALbertan government. If it was built we would see a very efficient transfer of profit directly to new initiatives. Now we're no further ahead AND we own a pipe-less pipeline project.

In an idea world, probably, but unfortunately taxes are politically toxic in the US, to the extent that imposing a new tax whose costs will ultimately be born by consumers is impolitic in a way that creating new consumer costs whose revenue accrues to private actors isn't. Voters aren't rational, and elected officials can't do a lot about that.

Also, revoking the permit can be done entirely by executive action, where a new tax would require cooperation from Congress, which the administration would never get.

This was actually the argument of the governments of Canada, to build it, but add a carbon tax.

Canada now has a federal carbon tax, BC has a carbon tax and Alberta did have one, but the previous government was thrown out in favour of a deeply conservative one (that is now woefully unpopular so the pro-carbon tax party is probably coming back).

You can see one possible issue with the case of the Albertan government changing. Easy to add/remove taxes, hard to add/remove pipelines. There's also even some question of whether the carbon tax will be effective. It arguably hasn't done that much in BC. This is probably because for political reasons it has been set low. A previous conservative government "froze" the tax at low rates. Scientists note the tax needs to be literally $100s more per ton of CO2 to be effective.

In my experience the carbon tax has seemed like a good idea, but has seemed in practice more of a political tool to generate the public acceptance of pipelines. The actual CO2 impact of the pipeline is absolutely in zero way mitigated by the carbon tax.

Unfortunately that demand is sticky. In North America, we have built our entire societies around plentiful fossil fuels. We cannot just turn that ship around on a dime.

Except I doubt everyone is going to walk to work, eat only locally grown produce in the winter (hope you like potatoes), feed the world without fertilizer and replace plastics with ... what, smug self-satisfaction?

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