Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

I can’t view the whole article due to the paywall, but I have to ask - where does this line of thinking lead? Does every pleasurable activity we might voluntarily undertake get scrutinized, regulated, or banned? I certainly hope not, since such losses of freedom can make the tyranny of the majority very real. It’s important that any potential policies are applied in a fair manner. For example, priced externalities shouldn’t be limited to just carbon dioxide or only applied to some things like cars or cows. In particular, those who support regulation or bans should also have their own favored things regulated similarly.

View on HN

There's nothing moralistic about a carbon tax - it's a Pigouvian tax, not a sin tax. The point of a Pigouvian tax isn't to say "I don't like that thing so let's tax it so other people do less of it," it's to say "Do what you want but don't make me or my children pay for the externalities it creates."

A decrease of carbon would many lower crop yields, could I sue for my lowered crop yields? The issue of a carbon tax is basically that politicians are only too happy to give more taxes, and would support carbon taxes regardless of it being good or bad.

Not sure about the potential for a private entity to sue another private entity for those damages - but sure, to the extent that beef production creates positive externalities, the value of those externalities should also be priced in. Though most of the warming potential from cattle farming comes from methane, not carbon dioxide, so I'd be surprised if it actually had a nonnegligible impact on crop yields, let alone an impact that came anywhere close to offsetting the negative externalities elsewhere.

Empirically, most politicians don't support carbon taxes. Market-consistent pricing of climate-related externalities is broadly opposed by politicians on both sides of the aisle in the US. For example, look at the massive subsidies to dairy farms in my home state of Wisconsin - they get over 40% of their revenue from direct subsidies in a typical year, and if you exclude those subsidies the industry hasn't made a profit for at least several decades, but no one dares to even suggest reducing or eliminating them, let alone going the other way and taxing the negative externalities they create.

Does the existance of a carbon tax in parts of Europe and usage of carbon credits show it is not that unpopular? California's electronics tax I always saw as a carbon tax in disguise. It would be labeled as moral code but in effect are taxes.

Not familiar with European politics but wasn’t a carbon tax one of the principal reasons for the yellow vest protests?

In the US, the vast majority are unwilling to do pretty much anything to fight climate change. ~70% oppose a $0.25/gallon gasoline tax; note that a true Pigouvian tax would be something like 20x higher than that based on the current cost of carbon removal. https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/climate-optimism-of-the-wi...

What kind of normal person wants to pay more for gas, especially when most of the population isn't in the upper income bracket in the US and mismanagement of tax funds is so common? I can't imagine why a teenage mother or person struggling with minimum wage desiring these extra costs or more taxes. The usage of the taxes is big issue, it is likely to just be pocketed by the politicians or as subsidies for large corporations that will have a disproportionate pollution effect. Taxes should be properly utilized and be proven through proof or as a fund like social security for the environment, rather than pay more for less and let them decide how to use the money if even its implimented. Nothing stops them from subsidizing gas companies with the taxes.

It's not about wanting to pay more, it's about wanting to stop causing damage that future generations will have to pay for. Young people in the western world today are quick to (accurately) accuse older generations of severely messing up the environment (as well as housing markets, government budgets, etc.) to enrich themselves at the expense of future generations. Given that, I don't think it's that crazy to expect those same young people to pay for the negative externalities their own activities create instead of just paying it forward.

The poll cited in the article I linked explicitly mentioned that the revenue would be used for policies to support greenhouse gas reduction. I'm skeptical that the respondents cared that much about how the money would get spent, since the vast majority did support policies that would tax the wealthy and/or companies that produce greenhouse gas emissions - the only difference is where they perceive the money to be coming from, not how it would be spent.

>It's not about wanting to pay more, it's about wanting to stop causing damage that future generations will have to pay for.

Is that what the common price sensitive citizen cares about?

>Given that, I don't think it's that crazy to expect those same young people to pay for the negative externalities their own activities create instead of just paying it forward.

You don't think young people are capable of being hypocrites? Statistics such as low savings is proof that long term planning isn't deeply embedded.

Survey data is notoriously unreliable, on a if the rich subsidizes itself it would be circular wealth, but coming from them means that they are adversely affected. Policies and their actual effect are also not the same, would they not care when government trust is low and its possible to use the money to subsidize large companies that use a green label to play metric? I know the idea of carbon neutral is simply ofsetting carbon negatives to other companies, transportation is a huge contributor and globalized companies play with numbers to call themselves carbon neutral. https://www.dezeen.com/2021/07/30/carbon-neutrality-google-s...

BTW thanks for showing me that substack, I subscribed, hope is sorely needed today.

Lower it compared to when? CO2 levels are much higher now than they were even 100 years ago. If we somehow managed to move CO2 levels back to 1950 levels is that really a problem?

Another problem. Say a given crop might do better with increased CO2 given all other factors remain unchanged. But that boost of CO2 from 300 ppm to 420 ppm also came with changes to the environment, so all other factors are not unchanged. OK, CO2 levels have gone up 35%, but if the likelihood of experiencing a rain-free period of more than 30 days in that region has doubled, having more CO2 isn't worth the cost.

*I made up the claim as an illustrative example. I'm sure there are myriad co-factors that come with the increase in CO2.

If the carbon is much higher today, then could the conclusion be that they are not the factor, or that they are beneficial? Heres some stats, many factors make up the efficiency, but as plants are carbon sinks, it would be a bold claim to make that it has not helped crop yields. https://www.farmprogress.com/equipment/eight-major-factors-h...

Localized effects are easier to calculate, but there are many factor. For example soybeans grow better under less sunlight, so the effect of a darker sky is higher yields. You are correct that is isn't a single effect its very dynamic and has many effects.

I think totalitarians just like more rules so they can be used as needed against people they don't like. It seems like advocates for these kind of things are generally in a position of privilege where they won't be personally affected. In practice, as another poster pointed out, it just becomes a war on the poor. If the price of steak doubles (and it has already doubled in the last few years) I'll pay it and grumble but it won't materially effect me and I wont change my behavior. Poor people who can't afford $30 per person per meal will just have to eat a substitute, which I guess is what advocates want.

This all (I mean basically every "progressive" restriction) just seems like a way to increase inequality and make sure the poor always stay very poor and the wealthy can do whatever they want.

I can drive my Posche plug-in hybrid in the carpool lane while the chump his old Corolla has to sit in traffic. Does that really do anything but increase inequality. (I dont really have Porsche, I can't imagine a more ridiculous choice, but I'm surrounded with people that do)

It’s been my observation that progressives seem to measure success of any position they hold more by its degree of good intention rather than it’s actual effects or results.

Why should anyone measure success? If the entire point is progress, then any and all benefit should go toward advancing the next position.

I don’t think that a magazine has the power to ban or set global policy on anything. They do have the ability (or perhaps the responsibility, as a free press) to to research, describe, and suggest alternatives to “every pleasurable activity we might voluntarily undertake.” That results in an informed majority, not a tyrannical one.

The most straightforwardly fair way to do it is a carbon budget. If each person has some carbon budget and you want to spend yours on beef and I want to spend mine on motorcycle racing fuel, who is to argue we made the wrong choice?

It goes back to one of my pet peeves that it is increasingly hard to find the kind of light bulbs I prefer, despite the fact that the electric supply to my home is powered by 100% renewable energy generated on site. I don't like that it was collateral damage of a grossly approximate attempt to lower residential fossil-generated energy consumption.

Do you just see it as carbon? What of the refinement of lithium ion batteries, the production of solar arrays and the toxic waste that accumulates from the production of these devices?

Ideally it would be a thermal budget rather than carbon.

Solvents from semiconductor production do not amplify and trap energy from the terrifyingly powerful object in the sky, threatening to destroy the biosphere, so yes it is all about carbon.

Ideally it would be an accurate reflection of all externalities in the final price, but how about we do not try to prevent tackling one of the externalities with whataboutism on other externalities.

I think it is unfair to call this “whataboutism”. If there isn’t a fair accounting applied to all activities and externalities, then what you’ll see is that those with political power will regulate only activities that aren’t important to them, while what they value personally is allowed unabated. Put another way, unequal application will lead to oppression.

The political system is not perfect, it has never been. Climate change is threat to our standard of living, we need to address it quickly. The only tool we have is a flawed political system where people seek power and use it to oppress other people. There is no time to first fix politics and then try to reduce carbon emissions.

> The most straightforwardly fair way to do it is a carbon budget.

And that kind of budget is just called a "budget". The resistance of a certain type of activist to using prices to allocate scarcity is going to doom us all if these activists end up setting policy. Prices force people to be honest about what's important and to make tiny trade-offs every day between disparate things. Ad-hoc bans are vulnerable to all sorts of political forces that all amount to people signaling false things about their preferences. Money doesn't have this problem.

There's a reason that there's this common phrase "put your money where your mouth is".

For most people with solar, surplus energy gets fed back into the grid. So, from a policy point of view it kind of makes sense to not allow people to use inefficient lights, even if they're running a surplus. Inefficient lights can consume a lot of energy.

Have you looked at metal halide lights? They require specialized ballasts, so they aren't exactly a drop-in replacement for a standard bulb. The light quality is said to be pretty good, similar to incandescents, but they're more energy-efficient. I have an unfinished project to make an indoor artificial sun (basically, some bright lights projected through lenses to create parallel rays), which is how I started looking at metal halide lamps.

Interesting. Would people be able to “buy” more budget? And how would that work for complex activities that have a chain of carbon producing activities. For example let’s take something like a bar. People visiting the bar to share drinks with friends are buying alcohol, which has its own impacts. The building the bar is in might be made of concrete, which has a carbon impact. The high frequency with which dishwashers are run there have an impact. Do all of these get included into the price of a drink? Whose budget does it come out of?

Don't worry, it's already happening now by the looks of it, and by the downvotes. In a couple of years you will be called anti-science if you don't want to eat the Impossible Burger, which is probably more processed than the IKEA table that you are eating it on. We will keep on promoting these wars of we, the good guys, agains they, the bad guys, while the rich and privileged will keep all their rights, safe in their ivory towers, private islands and New Zealand.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com