Do conservatives think there is something intrinsically good about gasoline/fossil fuel?

Politics & Elections
181

There are some in Hawaii (in the US). In 2013, there were 6 Tesla superchargers in CA and 2 on the east coast.

Anyways, I am not defending anything here. Hydrogen may again disappear from the fuel map as it has happened before. But it looks like there is momentum this time around.

Agreed the goal is to get to green hydrogen. Right now much of it will be blue and some would be grey. The goal is to setup the infrastructure and progressively move to green Hydrogen. In my opinion, the all or nothing , aka green or nothing thinking got us nowhere.

182

I read that to mean refueling stations for private cars. Just so we are on the same page, many mining companies operating equipment deep in mines switched to Hydrogen a decade and a half back.

There are about 50-100 hydrogen fueling stations for many warehouses and Industrial operations all over the US.

Just one company has "32,000 units in the field today, with more than 220 million run-hours of operation " (these are forklifts)

Check out their other solutions :

183

I read recently that non EV owners want to have. At least 500 miles of range on an EV to make their average daily 8 mile commute.

184

And today there are almost 1400 supercharging stations in the US and over 2500 worldwide. How long has Toyota been pushing hydrogen? How many H refueling stations have they built? If Toyota wants people to adopt hydrogen, they have to build the refueling network. No one else is going to do it.

Which is what I was asking about, so no problem.

185

You may be right. My 79 year old, deeply conservative father-in-law will angrily state that climate change is a hoax and in the next sentence praise Musk as if he were the second coming. I do however, believe his admiration is based on how rich Musk is rather than for the product that made him rich.

186

So, honest question: what is your opinion about a carbon tax that is phased in gradually, to give the infrastructure time to adjust? Which is exactly what Canada is doing. From the Canadian Taxpayer Federation [PDF] which AFAICT is just opposed to all taxes, but I believe this bit is factually correct:

The federal carbon tax currently costs 11.1 cents per litre of gasoline. The federal carbon tax will further increase from the current $50 per tonne to $65 in 2023, and then by a further $15 every year until it reaches $170 per tonne in 2030. By 2030, the $170 per tonne carbon tax will cost about 37.6 cents per litre of gasoline.

Do you support this gradual phasing-in strategy, or are you just opposed to any sort of government intervention to price the cost of externalities into fossil fuels?

187

I addressed what you said. You’re saying we can’t store nuclear waste in the desert because of water table issues. There’s no logic to that at all. We already store it on site and the water table issue would be far greater in populated areas.

There is no practical reason why nuclear power can’t help bridge the power gap in the near term. There is no one-solution-fits-all power solution because regions differ greatly on the best source of power. The most useful thing the federal government can do is coordinate and promote the most efficient transition to non-carbon self-sufficiency.

188

We’ve had electric (corded) lawnmowers for more than 40 years. We’ve never seriously considered going back to a gas-powered mower. No smelly cans of gas in the garage (well, not for the mower), no worries about how hard it will be to start, no concern about whether there’s enough fuel to cut the whole yard.

I did accidentally run over the cord once, creating a rather large amount of orange confetti and necessitating a trip to the hardware store for a replacement cord. But that’s been once in 40+ years.

189

Capitalists do not oppose change. Change is driven by markets all the time. Markets brought the automobile, which changed families forever. They brought computers, and AI, and social media. Conservatives may have lamented these changes, but they didn’t fight against it or rebel against free markets because they were causing so much rapid change.

What conservatives object to is top-down change being imposed on the culture and economy from those who think they are better stewards of the country than are the people themselves. They distrust central plans as inefficient and doomed to failure. And most especially, they do not want to be ruled by a technocratic ruling class advised by a ‘scientific’ priesthood. We’ve seen that movie play out in tears too many times.

Conservative economists tend to have a healthy appreciation for just how complex human societies and economies are, and how such systems are almost impossible to control. Attempts to do so lead to unintended consequences. They are ecosystems, not machines.

Liberal ecologists seem to understand this, hence the Precautionary Principle. We have learned that imposing change on ecosystems is likely to result in something w e didn’t expect or want. Human societies should be treated the same way. We need a precautionary principle for people who seek ‘radical change’ to an evolved system. Conservatives believe in incrementalism.

A good example is being demonstrated right now: Progressives started pushing big social and economic changes through institutions and government to make a better, more ‘progressive’ world. But their overreach has led to the biggest shift to the right in America in modern history, and a likely blowout of epic proportions in the midterms. And in the meantime, Republicans are replacing people like Paul Ryan wity people like Marjorie Taylor Green. Unintended consequences. We could wind up losing all the gains for marginalized communities that have been made in the last couple years and even go backwards from where we started.

Conservatives also strongly believe in TANSTAAFL - There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. Print and spend money, and you’ll get inflation and hurt the people you were trying to help. Stop arresting people for shoplifting, and you’ll get a lot more shoplifting. Weaken your military, and your enemies will take advantage. Forgive student loans, and people will stop paying them off hoping for another bailout.

And relevant to this thread, if you make your own energy more expensive and your competitors don’t, you will just move high-energy industries to them and give them a comparative advantage so long as they don’t do what you are doing. Rather than ‘setting an example for the world’, which is what liberals seem to believe in when advocating unilateral action, you create even greater incentives for your opponents to ignore the changes you want them to make. Your high energy costs redounds to their benefit. Your reduction in carbon reduces their social cost of carbon emissions, reducing their incentive to change. Why would they follow suit?

190

And right here, basically, is the problem.

Because we do need to remake the world. (And that’s something that happens all the time.) But a large number of people see no reason to change anything that affects them directly; even when they’re being affected directly by finding their houses underwater or on fire.

We’ll be living, eventually, like it’s 2050, and then 2100, and so on. There are a whole lot of options for what that might be like; but it’s not going to be like 1800. And it’s also not going to be like 1950, or like 2000, or like 2022. Those options are already off the table; because human desires aren’t the only thing setting that table.

The point of discussion isn’t really, are we going to change how we live? It’s: in what fashion are we going to change how we live?

You might be right. In which case they’re going to be underwater, or on fire. Quite a lot of people’s homes and/or livelihoods already are.

We need to be hopeful; because the only place despair will get us is into even greater disaster.

We actually know how to fix that: rebate the gas money to everybody earning less than $x / annually, possibly adjusted by availability of public transport.

Fixing people winding up homeless because they’re climate refugees is harder.

191

This sounds like some bullshit in the context of abortion. EDIT: And CRT, and in fact all the conservative social positions, where it seems that conservatives absolutely love imposing top-down change on the culture.

192

I love how once again it’s the liberal’s fault that conservatives are poised to start stripping minorities of their civil rights, which we forced them to do by our insistence on (checks notes) … fighting for the civil rights of minorities.

193

Be careful: if you’re going to do this, either make the rebate unconditional or partial. Carbon emissions are the same whether they come from poor people or rich, and we want to motivate both to make cuts. With a partial rebate (some smallish percentage of the gas price), poor people still have an incentive to conserve. Likewise, if everyone gets a $X rebate regardless of use, they’ll still be motivated by high prices to conserve. But if you rebate 100% of the price, or some high percentage of it, there is no such motivation.

194

Let me ask the green side of the Board this question:
If the US decided to go 100% green energy, how long would it take to become energy independent without any fossil fuels? Because when I hear liberals talk about renewable/green energy it sounds like they think we can be completely free of oil by October.

195

It’s a pretty weird take, since the very basis of capitalism is that of free trade: the ultimate free lunch. Free trade benefits both parties in the transaction; each is getting something they value more than whatever they’re giving up. Markets work best when trading is as free as possible (in the sense that the parties aren’t coerced or subject to fraud) and when there is a great deal of it going on.

TANSTAAFL also contradicts the central theme that competition spurs gains in productivity. Aside from trade, the increase in standard of living comes from being able to do things for a lower cost. It’s basically a Marxist view that gains in production just represent some type of theft from the workers, that a dollar gained here is a dollar stolen there.

Of course, we recently had four years of a conservative that clearly had a zero or negative-sum view of trade; that if the other party came out ahead in a transaction, it means he stole something from you. The very notion is anti-capitalist, and yet that’s where modern US conservatism is now.

The precautionary principle is one of the worst elements of left-leaning ecological thinking. You’re right to note that it’s essentially a conservative view: that we should make no changes unless we prove beyond the absolute shadow of a doubt that there will be no negatives. This is impossible, of course, and so the end result is that no changes will be made.

There is value in assigning some cost to the unknown, of course, but the precautionary principle assigns infinite cost to that. That is nonsense.

Instead of stupid bumper-sticker principles, we should take a realistic view of the positives and negatives of any proposed change, perhaps assign a marginally (not infinite) greater weight to the negatives to account for risk, and chart a course based on that.

196

When we talk about fuel cost “rebates” for low income earners in the context of carbon taxes, in practice this always means refunding an amount intended to partially or wholly compensate for those taxes. It certainly doesn’t mean that gasoline will be free. You were arguing that high fuel prices would make poor people “homeless”. This need not be the case of they’re compensated for the extra taxes. Poor people are already motivated to conserve gas just by virtue of being poor; they’re not going to start burning it with reckless abandon just because they got a tax rebate. The purpose of carbon taxes is to motivate conservation and switching to clean energy in the majority of the population – that big hill at the median of the income distribution bell curve. It’s not going to change the behaviour of the wealthy, but many of those are already interested in electric vehicles which are well represented in the high-end market.

197

Even accounting for hyperbole, here–who exactly are you talking about? Is there anyone that thinks this is less than a many-decade effort?

198

You seem to be conflating me with msmith537. I never said anything of the sort. I’m simply pointing out to be careful with the way the rebates are designed. Cheap gas changes the optimal point when selecting a vehicle. A cheap, old, inefficient one, or a new one that gets better mileage? If gas were free, you’d go with the old one. If it’s very expensive, you go with the new one. Somewhere between these two points is a cutoff. If you make gas too cheap, you’ll be motivating too many people to stick with the old, polluting vehicles.

199

I strongly suspect that many people, especially those in general short on cash, will choose to spend part of it on something else.

Are you envisioning the rebate as being given to the gas stations/ oil companies to bring their prices down, or as being given in the form of coupons good only for discounts on fossil fuels? That’s not what I mean at all. What I meant was: if the increase in fuel prices leads to an average increase of expenses per person in a given area, then everybody with an income below x (you can argue about x, which might well also depend on area) gets a check for $y at the beginning of each year. Possibly people in particular categories requiring more fuel usage get $y + z (along with work being done overall to reduce the requirements of those categories).

Most people, and nearly all poor people, who aren’t already doing everything they practically can to reduce the amount of fuel they need to buy, will look at that chunk of money and buy something else with part of it. Then they’ll look at the price on the fuel bill and cut their fuel usage.

Would depend on how we went about it; but I’ve never heard or seen anybody talk about it as if it could be done by this October. Everything I’ve seen or heard talks about decades.

Which is why we should have made that decision years ago. But what @Chronos said in post #157.

200

All I’m saying is that there are an infinite number of ways to design a rebate, and some of them lead to bad outcomes. There are zillions of different subsidies out there, and many of them are designed badly. For example, anything with fixed binary income cutoff leads to undesirable behavior, like people refusing to accept raises/promotions because it will put them slightly above the cutoff.

I agree that the form of rebate you laid out would be pretty reasonable, aside from the hard cutoff. That should instead be a gradual phaseout from lower and higher income levels.

Ideally, any rebate would still expose people to the full cost of the fuel. That is, if gas is $10/gal, and they make some changes to use 1 gal less, then they should save $10. That makes savings highly motivating.

If instead, for example, the rebate was per gallon, you reduce the motivation. Suppose you get $7/gal as a rebate. Then you only get $3 back for each gallon you save, which means you won’t be nearly as motivated to get a more efficient car, use public transit, etc.