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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

We already have a mechanism for carbon literacy - prices. Price roughly correlates to how much energy something took to produce and, by proxy, carbon required.

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That's simply not true at all. Except for a very narrow range of commodities price is very weakly correlated with production costs. The difference between a $10 steak and a $300 steak is not correlated with the energy used to produce either (in fact it may be negatively correlated, as the cheaper steak is likely to come from more industrial agriculture). And even production costs are rarely correlated with energy consumption (only for certain raw materials like aluminium, steel, and those tend to be produced in countries with cheap / subsidised energy).

Perhaps for a $300 dollar steak or a $10,000 pair of socks which I’m sure also exists somewhere , but the exception does not disprove the rule. Price is correlated almost perfectly with the energy it took to create the item for the majority of consumer goods and thus CO2. This is why switching to green energy will not work as your expensive lithium batteries actually took an enormous amount of resources to make and so on. Rising inflation and rising consumer prices are the opposite of what we need.

I'm so glad there are at least a few people who recognize this. Things like electric vehicles only make sense if they have a lower lifetime total cost of ownership than an equivalent ICE alternative.

I don't think that example works. If we analyse the situation holistically it will turn out that a $300 dollar steak does require a lot more resources than a $10 steak. A "$300 steak" is not just about buying the steak, because ultimately it represents the resources then consumed by the people who are providing the steak.

If someone who bought a $300 steak bought a $10 steak, then someone else can't burn as much energy to sustain their lifestyle. Of course, the energy would be reallocated to someone else - but at the end of the day we do get a rough proxy of where the energy is going from the price of things.

It is something of a tautology. Prices represent resource allocation, and the major resource we have is energy which comes from fossil fuel. Prices all but have to reflect where the energy goes.

100% agree. Way too much time is spent fretting about and trying to micro-calculate carbon "costs", when dollar cost is an excellent first approximation.

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