And we’re done here.
Does the U.S. provide more than 4% of the world’s goods and services? Going by population count is meaningless in a globalized world. For example, South Korea has a huge steel industry. Steel is incredibly energy intensive. But lots of their steel is exported. So who should get the blame for that energy? South Korea? Or the people using the products South Korea makes?
Let’s say the U.S. has 15% of the world’s CO2 emissions, but provides 20% of the goods sold in global export markets. Does the U.S. still look like the bad guy?
So are we then focusing on the U.S. just for moral reasons or out of self-flagellation? Or do we actually want to do something about climate change?
I am not sure reparations to coal miners is needed.
Even if we decided, tomorrow, to go 100% green with wind and solar and whatnot coal does not just disappear. Coal plants are out there and it would take decades to replace them with alternatives.
Basically the coal miners get phased out. The people with jobs keep their jobs but no new workforce are hired. In time it will all be phased out. Consider when automatic elevators became a thing. We did not have elevator operator re-training programs. The elevator operators kept working and new buildings just did not hire operators as they installed more modern systems.
That said if there is deemed to be some need for re-training then sure…if it makes sense do it.
As to the overall proposal the only proposal I have seen that remotely looks like it would work is a cap-and-trade system.
A cap on emissions is set then industries can buy and trade carbon credits. A market solution which, if done right, should balance itself.
The problem with all of this is the same problem OPEC has. It is all well and good to set targets to maximize profits but it is almost impossible to force other countries to agree (or even if they agree to not cheat). There would be a huge incentive for poor countries to tell the US to piss off and let industry come in and pollute to their heart’s content.
It is also almost impossible to tell poor countries to get with the program and not pollute. They will, rightly, point out that the rich countries polluted like maniacs and got rich and now they are telling the poor countries to not try the same thing and stay poor? They will give the US the finger and do whatever is in their best interests.
Which kinda means we are all screwed. We will not, cannot, stop this race to the bottom. At least I cannot see how it will work.
I wasn’t trying to bash the left, but explain how the inclusion of non-climate change left-wing policies is a bad idea. I would say the same thing if the Republicans came up with a plan that also required Democrats to sign on to a giant wall around the country. The point isn’t to say one side is bad, but to say that piggybacking unrelated policy into climate change policy for partisan reasons is a bad idea. And I was saying this in the context of explaining why I believe carbon taxes need to be handled differently to get the right on board.
We have your point of view anyway: You don’t know anything about the subject, but you like the idea of grand sweeping manifestos. Got it. Given that you don’t want to talk about actually implementing climate policy, that’s a better reason for leaving the thread.
My response would be that if we’re not at the point yet of actually trying to figure out how to do this stuff, then the 10-year timetable for doing almost anything is a fantasy. I thought we were more serious about actually doing something about climate change quickly. Apparently not. Because a manifesto won’t generate a single watt of clean power, and the engineering challenges are daunting.
To get compliance, you have to make it in the country’s best interest. There are several ways to do that:
- Come up with a better way to provide power to them
- Offer them a subsidy for converting to green power
- Make them an offer they can’t refuse
#1 might include what I mentioned above - a large scale project to bring small modular reactors, wind power and solar power to various places, using whatever makes the most sense in each place. Call it foreign aid.
#2 could simply be done by giving them money to not build coal plants, and they can use the money to import power or build clean plants.
#3 would involve tariffs as soft power, or blockades as hard power. This path has the highest likelihood of leading to military conflict.
It is not just power generation though.
It is allowing industries in your country to pollute.
I have no idea what that last paragraph means. What does ‘reasoning à l’Iraq’ mean? And how did this become a ‘sterile ideological exchange’?
Do you mean with CO2? Or other pollutants like SO2? If so, I’d suggest that that’s a different problem, and a different debate. But, one of the solutions could also work for CO2 emissions: An expansive foreign aid, tied to compliance with emissions standards. Make the aid larger than the cost to reduce emissions, and you can induce change. Other than that, I got nothing unless we want to start using the U.S. military to force people do do the needful. And I don’t think anyone wants that.
This might be decent PR, but in terms of “who we want to bail out”, I think coal miners rank somewhere between “people who own beachfront property” and “people who lost their job for any reason whatsoever in the past few years”.
The point of a carbon tax is not simply “raise money”. It’s also to reveal the hidden cost of carbon. If your gas costs 2 bucks a gallon, you’re essentially not paying for a massive externality, and as a result, you’re going to burn more gas and be less interested in ways to burn less. Meanwhile, when you calculate the cost of global warming in (currently an externality that absolutely nobody is paying for), you’re looking at a far higher cost.
It’s like… Imagine if every time you bought an apple, a third party to the transaction has a bucket of sludge dumped on their lawn that costs about a hundred bucks to clean up. If you never had to think about that problem, you’d probably gladly keep on buying apples for a buck a piece, because apples are delicious and a dollar for an apple is pretty nice. But in order to be fair, there’s no way around it - if you’re going to buy that apple, you need to pay for both the apple and the $100 in extra costs that occur as a result of your purchase. If you might end up buying considerably less apples… Well, shit, maybe you should buy less apples in that case.
And remember - this is, for all intents and purposes, the free-market solution. Taxes to correct externalities is about as close to “let the free market deal with it” as you can possibly get on this problem. There is no solution that’s somehow “more conservative” - that is as small-government as we get without simply wishing the problem didn’t exist.
Do you understand why getting conservatives to give a shit is such a hard lift? Why basically every proposal (including carbon taxes!) get slagged off as “socialism”?
Pollution in general is a problem but for this thread we are concerned with anthropogenic global warming and what we can do to stop it.
While power plants are primary culprits industry can be too (e.g. steel mills).
Sure. That’s one of the reasons why I think unilateral action is not going to work very well. What happens if the U.S. increases its cost of energy by eliminating fossil fuels? A) the cost of fossil fuels goes down everywhere else, stimulating demand and perhaps helping to move dirty industries to the worst places they could be, and B) the social cost of carbon goes down, which reduces the need for change even in countries that will be impacted by global warming.
This is not an easy problem at all. The best answer would be to use an energy source even cheaper or better, which will force them to follow suit to stay competitive. The only one I know of that has the potential for doing that is nuclear power.
Agreed. Lots of people lose jobs, and industries rise and fall. We don’t pay them reparations. Instead, we should have a general policy of worker assistance in cases of large-scale layoffs that can include job training, temporary financial help, relocation assistance, etc.
That’s why governments have to be REALLY careful with carbon taxes, because people are suspicious of their motives. Our government promised a ‘revenue neutral’ carbon tax that would be used to fight global warming. Then they exempted a whole bunch of people from it for political reasons. Then they redefined ‘revenue neutral’ to mean that they would take in the revenue and spend it as general revenue, but since the money was being spent on behalf of Albertans, it was ‘revenue neutral’. That kind of logic makes ANY tax ‘revenue neutral’. That kind of bait-and-switch is what leads to cynicism about the true nature of the tax as just another scheme to put money in the hands of politicians to do with as they see fit.
That’s also why I suggest that future ‘carbon taxes’ be more like airport levies - targeted at specific projects that can be monitored and quantified. “Trust us - we’ll spend it wisely” isn’t going to fly.
There is reason to believe green energy can be cheaper than fossil fuels. As technologies age they lower in cost. Nothing new there, happens in most industries.
Consider the cost of mining a fossil fuel and then transporting it and then refining it and then transporting it again to building a windmill or solar panel. I know it is more complex than just that but there is good reason to think green energy can be cheaper in the end.
Indeed this is a big part of the answer. Let new, alternative energy industries grow. Stop subsidizing fossil fuels (or subsidize green energy the same way…level the playing field). The better solution will naturally prevail via market forces.
It would be great if these things became cheaper than traditional power, becsuse then we wouldn’t have to do anything and the world would change over all on its own. But I am skeptical of ‘grid parity’ of renewable sources in general, when measured by cost at the point of delivery. But so far, every place I know of that has converted to solar and wind has done so at significant increases to delivered electricity costs.
There is an argument that higher energy costs begets more efficient practices:
Germany is set to missits climate goals both in 2020 and 2030. The reason is that it has rejected nuclear. “Shutting down nuclear plants is leaving Germany short of generation plants that can work on the breezeless dark days in winter when wind farms and solar plants won’t provide much to the grid—and demand is at its peak. Another problem: When it’s windy and bright, the grid is so flooded with power that prices in the wholesale market sometimes drop below zero.”
If they had kept the percentage of nuclear as they did 20 years ago they would already be generating over 50% of electricity with no carbon emissions and coal would no longer be the top fuel.
There’s an enormous difference between “worthless” and “not 100% effective.”
Of course toothless agreements aren’t as good as toothy ones. Of course unilateral actions aren’t as good as multilateral ones. So what the United States needs to do is to become a leader and a bully in this area, as we’ve been for years in other areas of international diplomacy.
Mitigating climate change is absolutely an issue of national security. We need to go back to the table of the Paris Accords, sign on enthusiastically, lead the world in reducing greenhouse gases. And then we need to predicate future trade deals on cooperation in this arena. Nations that continue to pollute get cut out of the best deals.
Central to this approach is our leading the way. We cannot possibly demand more of other nations than we demand of ourselves. We need to make foreign aid available to nations that are willing to pollute less.
But the idea that we won’t take serious measures until others do? That’s mutual suicide.
The problem I see with nuclear is first that it will take time. As we talked about in the GND thread infrastructure takes a long time to build in the US. One would think that since enviros think climate change is such an emergency that they would want to expedite solutions but we have seen that is not the case. Solutions that wish away opposition are not really solutions.
Secondly nuclear is aimed at the part of the problem that seems likely to be solved in other ways. After thirty years of empty promises it seems like renewables are finally becoming cost competitive with fossil fuels, at least in some areas. Batteries such as the kind Tesla installed in Australia are providing some solution to the problem of slack times for solar and wind. Consequently the electricity and heat production sector’s percentage of overall carbon production has been going down slightly since 2012.
Taken together it could mean that the investments in nuclear will have become obsolete by the time they are ready to be built. In contrast investments in carbon capture goals funded via carbon taxes could be ready more quickly if they are designed correctly and since they are sector agnostic they have no risk of being technologically obsolete and can target the entire sprectrum of carbon release.
Nuclear is way more complicated than this. New designs for nuclear facilities are, as near as I can tell, really safe. Old designs weren’t nearly so safe. So the complications are:
- Folks who grew up during the reign of old designs haven’t learned about the technical improvements (or are understandably skeptical, given misinformation from nuclear advocates in previous decades). These folks are an impediment to the introduction of clean nuclear energy.
- There really are issues with the currently-operating, old plants–but the nuclear industry stands in the way of regulating these plants according to modern safety protocols, because doing so would be expensive.
- New nuclear power, as puddleglum points out, would take a long time to get up and running even without angry activists.
Despite these issues, I do think modern nuclear plants are part of the solution to climate change–and many environmental activists agree with me. But the complexities of the question are usually lost in polls and indeed in most discussions of nuclear energy.
This it totally unrealistic. Of the 195 countries that signed on to the Paris accords 7have taken action to achieve the goals. Is the US really going to bully the other 187 nations effectively?
Take China the world’s largest carbon emitter. Exports to the US are 20% of the total exports and exports are 20% of their economy. So we could plausibly threaten to reduce their economy by 4% unless they take action that would reduce their economy by much more than that. Further, the idea that China would allow itself to be bullied by the US is risible. The whole CCP claim to power in China is that they are restoring China’s greatness after the century of humiliation. Allowing the US to bully them would be the last thing they would do. The US has been unsuccessfully trying to bully Iran out of its nuclear program for decades, and has been trying to bully Russia out of the Ukraine for 5 years with no sign of success.
Yet somehow the US is going to acquire the secret of bullying and successfully do it to every country in the world? There is no chance at all that could possibly work.