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Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

>If you want to eliminate fossil fuel use, and aren't just posturing for political convenience, stopping production makes a lot more sense than stopping emissions at point-of-use.

Talk about posturing. This is the least effective way to reduce carbon emissions, because it simply won't be done without sufficient replacement energy generation and transmission in place, as well as alternatives for spot-use of hydrocarbons like automotive, heating, etc.

If you want to get nothing done, propose solutions that make nobody happy. If you want to get something done propose solutions that can work.

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However, it would force people to do something. Restricting supply increases price, and thus alternatives/efficiencies become more viable.

An effective climate preservation campaign would focus on production facilities - coal mines, oil rigs etc. Not necessarily directly - for example the best way to shut down North Sea oil production would be to make it impossible to fly helicopters out there - protest airfields, helicopter maintenance depos, protest to the pilots, disrupt the logistics. Of course this then becomes a national security threat, and would be dealt with accordingly.

It forces them to vote you out of office and in come the subsidies for coal.

Yeah, for an example of how this works horribly in practice, look at how the French yellow vests rolled back their climate taxes

At better way is tax it. Governments are experts at taxing.

And corporations are experts at regulatory capture.

I would be amazed/surprised if one is introduced and effective. But you don’t get what you don’t fight for. Just because the odds are stacked against today doesn’t mean we can’t do something to shift that stack a bit for a better tomorrow.

More tax = increased cost to purchase resource = buyers finding cheaper alternative.

Until the supreme dictator decrees this we need to figure out something that works in a market economy as we don’t have a command economy.

> If you want to get nothing done, propose solutions that make nobody happy.

I agree with you, but this also reminded me of the old definition of "compromise": making sure that nobody is happy.

At the very least, counting the emissions from coal produced in Australia on Australia's carbon emissions ledger and attaching the 'externalities' to the producer makes more sense.

Coal consumption will not go down if Australia stops exporting coal. It's a fungible commodity. Whoever uses Australia coal would just move to another source if prices are increased to pay for the unreleased carbon.

If you cannot ensure a consumer is affected, it won't change consumption (which is what we want).

Well, that's why you have a global international treaty treating all producers the same, so they all have to pay the same carbon cost per ton of carbon exports. They can pass the cost onto the consumer in the form of higher prices, or they can absorb it themselves (reducing profit margins).

It's also just easier to do the accounting on the producer-exporter side.

Sure, if you can somehow get all producers on board, that would be the simplest. If you cannot get all producers to play by the same rules, you are going to have to examine the consumption side as well.

So far the nations of the world have not shown such a unified stance.

Most realistic and effective solution will be to get the biggest producers and consumers to all agree to join the system, whilst at the same time agreeing to place tarrifs on trade with those that won't join.

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