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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

People when carbon capture: This stinks of redirecting tax money. Hold accountable.

People when carbon tax: You made inflation high. Get out!

The ideal voter gets to ask for things he'll never get but complain about them if he does get them. That way he can act free of sin and simultaneously vote out people who give him that. There's always some other pretext. "I'm not voting him out for his carbon tax. I'm voting him out because X". Because the space of actions a political leader must do is large enough that nothing is perfect, the voter can always claim he is optimizing to some good.

In the West, people get what they vote for and my experience is that they're quite representative of peoples' views.

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> People when carbon capture: This stinks of redirecting tax money. Hold accountable.

> People when carbon tax: You made inflation high. Get out!

This is quite a funny observation. And true. The general psychological bias is when immediate known losses are standing against unknown future gains. Also Americans in particular are allergic to the term tax.

A carbon tax would be the most hands-off way to solve the problem. Ideally phased in slowly and with a clear price structure from the get-go. All you need is:

- industry needs to know how much they will be taxed in X years, so the bean counters can put it in their projections so execs listen

- the tax needs to be tight enough so you can’t escape through tax “planning” aka move operations to unregulated countries

The rest takes care of itself. Once there’s a tangible measurable cost things will change quickly from green leaf-decorated “we care”-pamphlets to fire in the ass of the decision makers.

>People when carbon capture: This stinks of redirecting tax money. Hold accountable. > >People when carbon tax: You made inflation high. Get out!

It's almost like the voting population consists of people with various different opinions. Personally if I could be assured that a carbon tax would be spent mostly on low-overhead tree/algae farming, and to a lesser extent useful research, I would be ok with it. Otherwise, it's just a cash grab that impoverishes people more for no benefit.

Haha, of course. Carbon taxes can't be a cash grab if they're revenue neutral which is easy to do: just evenly split by each taxpayer+dependents and send it back as a tax credit. In fact, that's exactly how it's done right now in many places that implement it.

But no algae farms, sorry. Sort of illustrates the point perfectly hahaha.

>Carbon taxes can't be a cash grab if they're revenue neutral which is easy to do: just evenly split by each taxpayer+dependents and send it back as a tax credit. In fact, that's exactly how it's done right now in many places that implement it.

Tax credits are a scam too. I'd rather have everyone pay a reasonable low tax for this purpose than favor some people and uses over others. The market will probably sort that out if you let it.

>But no algae farms, sorry. Sort of illustrates the point perfectly hahaha.

Most of our oxygen comes from algae, so it's not crazy. But I'd prioritize other things first, probably.

I generally agree with you, but in terms of CO2 output the West is not really the problem anymore. It's developing countries, and the general argument they have is that "why should we have to suffer with slower economic output when you didn't?"

"The West" is absolutely still the problem. No country is on a path that is compatible with 2° warming.

No country in the world is on a path compatible with the supposed 2 degree goal, and it's not mainly a problem of the West. I think the whole climate freakout is a scam in the first place. In any case, the West should not cripple itself as other countries continue business as usual. We can't survive like that, and it won't be the climate that gets us either.

Yeah, but that's not going to work because we used carbon to fuel growth and then decarbonized. Everyone else saw that China did the same thing to raise half a billion out of poverty. Everyone remaining saw that India raised more than that out of poverty burning carbon.

It's not like we're going to give developing countries nuclear power so their choice is coal, natural gas, wind, and solar. And inevitably they follow that specific chain of energy build-out as their growing economy starts cleaning up. No one has demonstrated a high-scale success that is not that.

If anything the West needs to to be a model and driver for a carbon neutral or negative lifestyle. We burned all the carbon in the first place, and developing countries will suffer the consequences disproportionately.

Let's look at the data [1], which should be a table of per capita emission/country, sorted by 2022 numbers. The countries at the top have to make the largest changes in their socio-economic systems in order to get close to zero emissions. While countries at the bottom have to make minimal changes. They simply have to not emit in the future by using carbon-neutral methods to attain improved human well-being.

You will note in the table [2], that at the top are the oil producing countries in the Middle East, followed by Canada, USA, and Australia. Most of the large European countries are far below. The bottom half of the table obviously contains no West countries.

China has half the per capita emissions of USA/Canada/Australia, and the same as current Europe, and it's already decreasing both its population and soon its per capita emissions.

It's precisely the people in the Middle East and USA/Canada/Australia have to make the largest changes in their systems. China+Europe have to follow the same downward trajectories.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/co2?tab=table&time=2011...

[2] Please ignore small countries, which have negligible total emissions.

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