96% of climate policy since 1998 failed | Hacker News Reader

96% of climate policy since 1998 failed

alumni.ox.ac.uk

75 pointsdebo_88 comments

Climate policy fails because the proposals are eye-wateringly expensive, amounting to trillions of dollars annually. In contrast, the CFC protocols and treaties worked splendidly because they were cheap, costing only billions of dollars to switch to chemicals which didn’t interact with ozone.

Changing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is not the only way to change the climate, and is unlikely to be the cheapest way to change the climate. But acknowledging that would require having a diplomatic/societal technology to determine what the optimal climate should be.

Aren't we going to lose Trillions of dollars forever to climate change anyway?

If we sit on our thumbs and do nothing about it perhaps (the uncertainty bars around long term damage are massive though). But changing CO2 levels is not the only way to avert that damage.

What are the viable alternatives that you have in mind?

What else is there? Geoengineering sounds interesting but nobody knows what the ultimate effects would be in a complex system like the Earth. And if geoengineering is done on a global level there will probably be winners and losers. How do you negotiate that?

The strong do what they have to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.

> But changing CO2 levels is not the only way to avert that damage.

It is currently. Everything else is basically gambling on technology that doesn't yet exist.

We removed sulphur from ship fuels and managed to increase the temperature by 0.1C almost immediately. We may not intentionally be using non-CO2 methods to influence the climate but we are certainly capable of it by accident.

So you propose we roll the dice and hope for more accidents to happen?

I propose we use our powers of reasoning and knowledge of chemistry as a species to try to do better than just rolling the dice and hoping for the best. Economic suicide and blind luck are not the only options. But for some economic suicide appears to be the goal.

It’s very hard to prove conclusively that any measures would actually help the situation.

If anything shows the great failure of the church of economics, it's this attitude. "Everything has a monetary value".

Here's a clue to those in denial: economics can only value things in the past and the present, and only in approximation, and only in human terms of immediate utility.

Because economics CANNOT properly value virtually anything that has not yet occurred. Accounting systems may exist for it and of course they are the favorite of the cooked book. The faith that the free market is some vastly hyperintelligent entity that exceeds the power of human cognition.

Of course human perception of reality is fundamentally flawed, even for those with heavy scientific training in the compromises our senses and psychology make to perceive the world. And yet economics treats the flawed everyday idiot as some ultrapowerful computational unit of valuation of reality. Of course, that is dogma.

What is the economic value of a recently extinct species? What is the economic value of a non-acidic ocean? What is the economic value of the continued operation of oxygen-producing microorganisms in the ocean?

What is the value of the human race if it goes extinct?

The core of the problem is the function of money and monetary value: it has an essential component of whitewashing virtually all environmental impacts and damage, as well as human misery, inflicted in the generation of the "currency number". Once the "currency number" has been "earned", the sociopathy involved in the generation is blessed by the church of economics as a completely forgiven sin: because the money is the only point, a tautological pursuit.

What oil executive, car executive, politician, industrialist, coal mining executive will every face the music for their environmental sins? Because they have been immediately pardoned from the confessional booth of the limited liability corporation.

One of my prayers for cryptocurrency was a way of creating a currency that could somehow devalue these fortunes of destruction once their true macabre consequences became apparent, but it would just be another farm of energy-sucking servers, and lets face it, the damage is mostly done at this point.

So, rant aside, it doesn't FUCKING MATTER WHAT THE DOLLAR FIGURE IS IF WE GO EXTINCT. Dollars don't exist without humans, and humans don't exist without a functional biosphere. The cost is Infinite Floating Point Overflow. It is NaN.

> Changing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is not the only way to change the climate, and is unlikely to be the cheapest way to change the climate.

We are changing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and it is the main driver for the climate change. You probably wanted to say, that not changing the amount of CO2 is unlikely to be the cheapest way to keep the climate as it is, didn't you?

Well properly fixing the current issues would require removing a hundred years of CO2.

Roger Pielke Jnr has coined "Pielke's Iron Law" .

It is :

"If there is an iron law of climate policy, it is that when policies focused on economic growth confront policies focused on emissions reductions, it is economic growth that will win out every time."

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-iron-law-of-climate...

It looks like a pretty good rule of thumb.

Except the two are not mutually exclusive, and TFA points out that tax and price incentives tend to be successful. I would take anything from Pielke with a grain of salt. As much as he loves to pay lip service to supporting the most minor climate policies, he notoriously downplays the effects of climate change. But that's just par for the course to be on the AEI payroll, I suppose.

I have a theory called "marginal cost pricing" that will blow his mind.

Who cares about the optimal climate, we just need the rate of change to remain at a low enough level that nature (including humans) can adapt. We seem to be on the edge of that limit already.

Also the main detractors have a reputation for not believing things that can be proven in general.

I remember all the hate USA got when it didn't sign the Kyoto Protocol. Its emissions have fallen ever since then, despite population rising by a quarter.

easy to cut emissions when you deindustrialize

Yes that helps but more important was the fracking revolution that replaced a lot of coal with gas.

Probably the easiest way would have been to draw a line around each factory in the US, declare that those now counted as outside-US for emissions purposes, and then declare that now the US was a zero-emissions country.

Done and dusted, problem solved.

Take it up with China. They are building tons of coal plants as we speak, and also eating our lunch in trade.

Edit: I got a "posting too fast" nonsense message. So here is my response to "solar is cheaper than coal, they are fools":

China has a TON of solar panels and batteries. They make most of them. So they apparently think coal is worth it anyway. If coal was more expensive or worse overall, theu would be absolute suckers to ship their product to us.

If they are still building a ton of coal they’re making a colossally foolish mistake.

Solar is already far cheaper than coal for new installations, and the price is still falling.

They're building coal peaker plants to complement the massive amount of solar they're building. The capacity factor of their coal plants has halved at the same time the number of plants has doubled -- those coal plants just run at night.

Up until this year coal has been cheaper than batteries for this task. That changed this year and they're now building some very large battery farms and i invasive their coal builds will drop.

> That changed this year and they're now building some very large battery farms and i invasive their coal builds will drop.

This is an under-considered point: just because energy sources like coal or solar, etc. are being installed NOW doesn't mean they will be there forever. Here in the UK, there is often a lot of opposition to solar and wind farms. But I would expect those eventually to be phased out in the same way as coal once better/cheaper forms of generation come along.

With all of the AI demands for electricity, as well as the strategic importance of 24/7 power production, you should not hold your breath for coal plants to be decommissioned.

AI and crypto uses a lot of electricity in relative terms, not in absolute terms.

If AI and crypto use 2% of a country's electricity, that's a big deal relative to the average growth in electricity usage of 1% per annum.

But the challenge is converting 100% of the power to carbon-free. If you can do 100% you can do 102%.

Literally on the day you posted that comment:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/30/end-of-an-e...

How much of that is due to outsourced production though?

Our modern lights, screens and appliances all use less energy than 30 years ago.

And as a result we're using our lights, screens, and appliances far more than we were 30 years ago.

US emissions peaked in 2007 and have since fallen to 1980s levels: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=52380

2021 reversed this trend. Guess why?

Was 2021 too early for AI training to be the reason?

2020 was one outlier data point caused by COVID?

No, we aren't really. Did you ever hear someone say they couldn't use their computer or TV because it uses too much power? How about refrigerators? Air conditioners might be in that category, but only the poorest people would use an AC less because of cost.

>but only the poorest people would use an AC less because of cost

I think you may be surprised here.

Well there are the crazies that ran the Paris Olympics, who wanted athletes to not have AC. I suppose there are also some very miserly people who can afford AC and refuse to use it. But let's just say my statement is general and leave it at that.

How much of the US's power is used in lighting? Lighting usually isn't a major energy sink, the load is light (hehe).

Regardless, you also probably aren't accounting for the well known https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox that means you can't expect to reduce energy use through efficiency gains. Energy is too important to raising quality of life, people invariably find uses for it unless the cost goes.

The US target in the Kyoto Protocol was a 7% reduction from the 1990 baseline in 2008-2012. That target has still not been reached, because the emissions continued growing until the mid-2000s.

Purely logically that means nothing.

It’s like saying “John refused to do chemotherapy yesterday and he’s still alive today”.

Yeah, he had some improvement. That doesn’t mean anything about whether or not a certain action would have led to more improvement or not.

Further, specifically regd. The Kyoto protocol, the largest economy in the world not signing the Kyoto Protocol or exiting the Paris agreement has massive knock on effects on other countries as well. Their leaders will find it much more difficult to push better policies and can easily refuse being bound to actual targets because why should they do it if the largest economy in the world doesn’t.

The Kyoto protocols contained three market based emissions reduction schemes of the type that this research shows to have meaningful impacts.

The headline focuses on a difficult number but the article pointed out 63 effective policies that government can focus on. Unfortunately, these seem to be the tougher policies like carbon tax which people aren't fans of... But it makes sense, you pollute you should pay for the cleanup.

I would really like the cost of CO2 emission to start to tend towards the true cost of capture and storage of CO2. At the moment that price is heavy and I think that should be the goal and any fines for organisations that breach emissions laws should be set on that basis. It might never come down but I hope it does but in the meantime that is the price of emissions.

Carbon tax has wide popular support across the globe.

Really?

Not a huge expert but this is a huge talking point on the right. They don't like the carbon tax. E.g. second result from a simple search: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/carbon-tax-political-popula...

Yes, Liberals (such as me) like carbon taxes. But even among liberals taxes aren't a popular subject. Especially not a potentially regressive tax like some carbon taxes.

Just looking at Canada, it seems their support has dropped below half, but speaking generally, it's popular. E.g. https://globescan.com/2021/11/05/new-global-poll-shows-growi...

Today is Jimmy Carters 100th birthday. One of the big reasons he lost was the price of gas. That's a carbon tax. Second result for "carbon tax popular support":

> The consensus among today’s economists is that a carbon tax is one of the most effective tools for reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Among many Americans, however, concerns over cost-of-living and the competitiveness of American manufacturing trump the recommendations of policy experts. A 2019 Pew Research study found that two-thirds of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, who largely oppose carbon taxes, believe that scientific experts are worse or no different at making science policy decisions compared to other people. Popular reluctance to support a carbon tax has, in turn, sapped Democratic eagerness to campaign on such a strategy: emails from the 2016 Clinton campaign called a carbon tax “lethal” in the general election out of fear of alienating potential swing voters. Polarization and political hesitation on carbon taxes have stalled to little advancement of this policy idea, despite the support from economists.

From here: https://esg.wharton.upenn.edu/climate-center/building-popula...

> Media reporting on things is always going to be biased by big oil, I don't read the news.

The problem is that this big oil biasing works. People buy into that and real people accept that. Trivializing their concerns is also wrong because this is indeed could be a regressive tax that will cost working families a lot of money. The solution is to address these concerns and understand them. Not deny them.

And with the worsening weather events (Hurricane Helene ripped through the Florida Keys and other areas in its path), we are seeing the consequences of our collective inaction.

While that's predicted to happen, it doesn't appear to have happened yet.

https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/

> In summary, it is premature to conclude with high confidence that human-caused increases in greenhouse gases have caused a change in past Atlantic basin hurricane activity that is outside the range of natural variability, although greenhouse gases are strongly linked to global warming.

Don't forget about the category 4 Hurricane Helene from September of 1958.

Every time there's a huge storm you shouldn't just go about yelling "climate change!", just like you can't claim we've fixed climate change just because we have a few nice calm sunny days.

Right. It's not about 1 storm in isolation. Climate change is evident through the very clear and measurable patterns of weather over time, not to mention glacial loss, ocean acidity, etc.

Why is this downvoted? I dont understand what is controversial here.

     https://i2.wp.com/www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif?zoom=2

are graphs of temperature and CO2 going back to the end of the last ice age.

There have been many efforts to model the temperatures and make predictions. At

     http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg

is a graph showing several predictions starting in 1975. The predictions were from small to big changes. The comparatively accurate predictions were from the comparatively small changes.

Not really surprised.

Every time I open Apple Weather and look at the daily average it seems to be ~ +5c the norm, about a year ago I just put it down to "must be a warm summer" but it's been like that for almost 12 months now. It's autumn and it's crazy warm.

Either Apply weather has some serious bug, or it's the climate that's ruined. Even the trees seem a bit confused.

What's that data going to look like in a decade? I really hate to think.

You might live in an unusual place or Apple could be providing misleading data. The 5c above norm isn't accurate for the majority of the world.

...or I might be living in a place experience an extreme heatwave induced by anthropogenic warming ?

"Melting Glaciers force Switzerland and Italy to Redraw Borders"

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/sep/29/melting-...

It's anthropogenic (human caused) warming.

Thanks

When there are cold years we are told this is short term weather and not long term climate. But every warm year and storm is evidence of long term change.

You're reading the wrong sources. The actual science is clear, the earth is undergoing rapid climate change due to human-driven CO2 release.

Please read my comment closely. Whether that’s true or not, according those scientists we can’t use how we feel about seasonal weather as evidence of it.

My point is we're not actually being told that cold weather is weather and hot weather is climate change, except maybe by people wanting to muddy the waters on the issue

This is daily coverage of the issue on popular outlets like NPR.

That's a good point. 1 storm in isolation is not evidence of anything. A pattern of increasingly severe weather events is.

Not only that, normalized by region, decade, astronomical configuration, etc.

If you read a few papers about metholodgy for identifying trends in global temperature it’s quite complex.

Record high temps are almost 75% of new temperature records. The ~25% that are new lows ate due to arctic cold slipping down with our more wobbly jet stream. And the ice melt has hidden almost 90% of the net heat increase. Ice melting the last degree consumes much more heat than going warmer. This is all happening much faster than any time in our geologic record. We are at serious danger of runaway warming.

Good. Accelerate.

wtf..?

Its a (well known in climate science) impact that the temperature over land is about double that of the average warming. The other effect is that the warming isn't evenly spread across the world so some places are gaining temperature considerably faster than others.

Sure, but after so long of seeing +5c it's getting a little unnerving, plus, it's just hot all the time, I love cooler weather and wearing jeans when working outdoors etc, usually by now it's very cool, but We just can seem to get to that point yet.

Amazed it’s that low.

As a group, wealthy people (in the global sense — i.e. anyone reading this) aren’t inconvenienced enough by climate change yet. So there’s a 0% chance that they’ll supports any climate policy that negatively impacts their quality of life in any way.

But they also don’t want to feel like Part of the Problem, so they’ll enthusiastically support do-nothing policy.

Even if we were affected we wouldn't support policy that negatively impacts our quality of life. The point of policy is to improve QoL.

Yes, exactly. People won’t trade their QoL today for a better future for the planet. At some point that will have to be done by force rather than choice. So yes, you’d better hope the magic policy that both A) Works and B) improves QOL today is found.

Although to be honest, this point won’t come until everyone alive today is probably long dead so it doesn’t matter that much.

> So there’s a 0% chance that they’ll supports any climate policy

/me reviews dozens of serious mass actions, hundreds of long form publications, and legislation in California and elsewhere.. wondering how this fits with "zero percent" of anything.. can we regroup and rephrase a bit here?

No need to rephrase! You can simply continue moving your eyes left to right to find additional words!

I know someone who was a post-doc researcher in climate policy. a seeming sorely needed are of expertise. But a large enough group of the population just wanted to cry, the government is too big, and we don't want to waste money on policy analysts so there has been no opportunity to actually do anything.

I guess, I want to know what the how accurate the models from 1998 on have been.

Iirc, “An Inconvenient Truth” was put in 2006. I remember it winning Best Documentary.

> We find that climate models published over the past five decades were generally quite accurate in predicting global warming in the years after publication, particularly when accounting for differences between modeled and actual changes in atmospheric CO 2 and other climate drivers.

https://eps.harvard.edu/files/eps/files/hausfather_2020_eval...

18 years later and it's still the misleading propaganda it has always been.

I can't say for 1998, but this paper[1] compares the IPCC projections made from 2000 and onwards.

The earlies estimation underpredicted temperature rise while later ones did better.

I also checked the IPCC predictions from 2001 myself a couple of years ago[2], and across multiple factors like sea rise, glacier loss etc observed values seemed to be within the predictions.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-16264-6

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27166369

CIA Superior: What did we learn, Palmer?

CIA Officer: I don't know, sir.

CIA Superior: I don't fuckin' know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.

CIA Officer: Yes, sir.

CIA Superior: I'm fucked if I know what we did.

CIA Officer: Yes, sir, it's, uh, hard to say

CIA Superior: Jesus Fucking Christ

(From "Burn After Reading", a wonderful movie)

I was contemplating tossing in a “If the policies you followed have brought you to this, of what use were the policies?” but it’s more than likely that these policies were designed to fail and were a distraction. Climate change to TPTB is a situational comedy.

> Yet in the vast majority of policies there was no discernible emissions reduction beyond what would be expected based on long-term economic and population dynamics.

There are 2 billion more people, or 33% _more_ people, than there were in 1998. What reduction was "expected?"

> In developed countries, pricing stands out, whereas in developing countries, regulation is the most powerful policy.

Ah. We keep the poor destitute and we allow the rich to buy indulgences. Perhaps your "expectations" are entirely flawed?

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