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

Politics & Elections
221

Sure, phasing in a carbon tax is better than dropping it all at once. That doesn’t mean it works in every situation.

In raw economic terms, a carbon tax makes sense, and is even a ‘conservative’ solution: Instead of getting involved in picking winners and losers in the market, you just use a ‘Pigouvian Tax’ to correct for the externalities that distort the market, and let it adapt to the new reality. Then you use the revenue to fix the problems caused by the initial market externality. Standard classical economics.

However… Standard economics cannot overrule reality. If you want nuclear fusion you can tax the shit out of all the alternatives and you still won’t get niclear fusion if it’s impossible. You’ll just bankrupt a lot of people.

Biden is talking about the pain of high taxes being part of a ‘glorious transition’. I would ask, “Transition to WHAT?” Energy is famously inelastic to price changes, especially in the short term. So what behaviours are people supposed to do today if they don’t want to pay the tax? Buy an electric car? Good luck finding one. We are already resource constrained on batteries and rare earths and chips. It takes 5-10 years to open a new lithium mine. By the way, those $7500 imcentives in a world of restricted supply has just jacked up the price of the cars.

Last year 8.6% of passenger cars sold were electric. At that number, we have multi-year waiting lists. The other 91.4% of cars sold will be on the road for an average of another 12.5 years, Also, because we have taken so much electricity offline by shutting down coal and nuclear plants, the price is going up which is reducing the advantage of EVs. I just watched a video where a Ford Lightning competed with a Ford TurboDiesel. After the same driving distance, the Lightning cost $27 to recharge at a supercharger, while the TurboDiesel cost $32 to fill back up. Not that much difference, except the Lightning needed over an hour, and the other vehicle was done in 5 minutes.

In another test, a Lightning extended range pulling a 6000 lb trailer had its range reduced to 87 miles. That’s not a usable range. And the Lighning has a huge battery. For towing, EVs are not ready for prime time

In the meantime, we need 30% more electricity generation to handle electric cars and no feasible plan to provide it. Cities will need major infrastructure buildouts for home charging, and no one is planning for that either.

Everyone expects electric car sales to increase year over year from now on, but it’s possible that it will go the other way - as more electric cars are sold, it will soon be difficult to get charging infrastructure at home, there will be lines at electric charging stations, there will be rationing of charging when electrical demand is high and supply low, and the whole market will self-limit until the entire supporting ecosystem catches up.

Until then, you could double the carbon tax and all you’ll do is impoverish people further and distort the economy, because the people being taxed have no alternatives to what you are trying to push them away from. They’ll just take it out on you at the ballot box.

In energy generation, we are killing baseload power with no replacement. Wind and solar cannot do it without the ability to store energy for weeks, which we don’t know how to do and if we did would take many years to bring online. We are on a path to disaster. Our refusal to rapidly build out nuclear power is going to leave us with brownouts and blackouts, or a reversion to coal plants like other countries.

Germany has been heavily building out wind and solar for 20 years, while shutting down conventional and nuclear energy generation. The result is that they now import 55% of their energy in the form of natural gas from Russia, and they are considering re-opening coal plants. A total disaster. The Ukraine war wouldn’t have happened if Putin didn’t have massive leverage over iEurope due to natural gas, and without the revenue those sales are bringing to fund his war machine. Talk about your unintended consequences…

The most likely result of high carbon taxes at this time are that they will contribute to inflation, make business less competitive and drive more of it to China and India, and piss off the public to the point where they kick the Democrats to the curb and elect people who promise to make gas cheap again.

222

Where were all these conservatives worried about our grid when air conditioning started becoming popular? The grid will collapse! The Precautionary Principle says we can’t anticipate all the secondary and tertiary effects! What if we create a generation of people so coddled by climate control that they become unable to solve any difficult society-wide problems?

223

And then you explained what I did not say or quoted. You missed that AT&T had to drop their Transistor patents thanks to government oversight. Without that government oversight, computers, and AI, and social media would not have been as advanced as they are today.

So, no, you did not reply after all. The main point was that eventually one has to realize that markets can give you things like the automobile, but when one considers the almost insane opposition from your marketplace to basic regulations that tell the automakers to make them more safe or to stop being gas guzzlers, it is then not good to assume that the marketplace will do that on their own.

224

Drive less. Consume less.

225

Tell that to truck drivers, delivery drivers, people with long commutes, manufacturers, or others who are unable to just ‘consume less’ energy.

Sure, people will conserve more. There are already stories about people cancelling vacations due to the price of gas. But that’s really on the margins. In the short term maybe you can cut your annual mileage a bit and turn your thermostat up/down a few degrees. But energy is the feedstock of a modern economy, is strongly correlated with GDP, highly inelastic in demand, and in many cases simply can’t be cut back without cutting back on the production of the goods and services that need it.

226

That seems like a mighty big stretch. Lots of things have been patented that didn’t hold us back at all. And patents would have expired long ago anyway. Qualcomm enabled the entire cellphone industry with patented tech. It’s doing just fine, and so are they.

227

We should cut back on the production of goods and services that need energy.

I don’t understand why this is complicated. If our economy is destroying the planet for future generations, then it’s not worth propping up.

228

Did you support Biden’s ‘infrastructure’ bill? Do you have any idea how much steel and concrete it’s going to consume? And how more fossil fuels all that heavy machinery will consume! Should it be canceled? Steel is extremely high energy, and concrete is one of the larger contributors to CO2 emissions.

If the Democrats take that attitude, they won’t be able to be elected as dogcatchers. Your attitude is not only ridiculously unworkable politically, but would be immensely destructive on a human scale, and the pain would be felt most by the poor and working class. Maybe that’s why the Democrats are losing working class voters in such large numbers.

And our economy is not ‘destroying the planet for future generations’. The planet is not being destroyed by climate change. It is being warmed slightly, which will cause adaptations until we reach a new equilibrium. The most likely scenario is warming of around 2.5C by 2100, or an additional 1.5C from where we are now. That will cause unpredictable changes, which we will ultimately have to pay to either mitigate or adapt to. The ‘social cost of carbon’ is based on the estimated costs of that change. The range of reasonable values for that number do not reach infinity.

In any event, any policy that explicitly tells people they must get poorer right now for society’s long term good is going to fail. So people lie and talk about ‘good green jobs’ replacing oil ptch jobs, and claim without evidence that we will become the green providers to the world and actually profit from dismantling our energy system for something more expensive and less reliable. No one in politics is saying, “Nice economy we had - too bad it has to go.” Because they want to actually get elected.

229

And so we see that American politics, left or right, is just a large scale version of “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

230

In terms of politics, I can vote for people who deny climate change is a problem (or even real), or people who propose nonsense solutions. Yay.

Green infrastructure is a convenient lie for people who are unwilling to sacrifice their standard of living. Lefties eat that shit up.

We can’t consume our way out of a consumption problem. Does that answer your question?

And the poor and working classes are going to be disproportionately hurt by climate change. Damn. They can’t catch a break.

You’re making a great argument for taxing the hell out of the rich, though.

If your only response is that we’re all fucked because the tragedy of the commons means that solving climate change is politically impossible, then, well, come join me in the pit of despair. It’s true. We’re fucked and collectively nobody wants to deal with it.

231

Entirely the opposite. Far-left environmentalists have an almost religious belief that the only way to cure nature is for humans to suffer. It’s a weird kind of guilt or penance on their part.

In fact we can have our cake and eat it too. We just have to stop doing the stupidest thing possible at all times, which is sticking with the current approach to energy generation.

Cheap, sustainable energy is already here, just not universally deployed. Establishment propaganda of course reinforces the belief that society has to run on burning shit, and the far left and conservatives alike eat that up. Meanwhile, productive members of society are working on moving forward with technology that’s both cleaner and more abundant.

Of course, it’s too late to make it through the crisis without things getting worse, first. But that would be true no matter what we did. We need to move to fully green energy as rapidly as possible to reduce the duration of the crisis, and give ourselves the best tools for avoiding the inevitable pain.

232

Not likely when the one I quoted is Richard R. John, Jr. “American historian who specializes in the history of business, technology, communications, and the state. He is a professor of history and communications at Columbia University.”

It remains notable that you did respond a lot to what was not the point. You assume that I was talking about dismissing the markets when they give us the internet and cars. I did not. The point stands, it is naive to assume that no government regulation can be beneficial, specially when in real life, while there can be good incentives for industry to do the right thing, there is however a lot that markets miss, perverse incentives are ignored a lot.

233

One has to point out here that most conservatives count on ignorance to get those results at the ballot box.

It ignores that there are a lot of people in government and new industries that are working on those issues.

“I’m not sure there’s a one-size-fits-all strategy,” said Polly Trottenberg, the US deputy secretary of transportation, during a media call Thursday. She would know: Trottenberg was, until recently, head of the Transportation Department in New York City, where she oversaw her fair share of EV charging experiments. At least money is on the way to help cities figure it out. The federal infrastructure bill contained $7.5 billion to support hundreds of thousands more public charging stations. States including California—which has pledged to stop selling new gas-powered cars by 2035—also have programs dedicated to building more chargers.

Whatever the strategy, though, cracking the problem is vital if cities—and the feds—want to stick to bigger goals for improving equity, accessibility, and racial justice, which many politicians have named as priorities. After all, low-income folks can’t switch from traditional cars to electric ones until they have abundant access to affordable charging infrastructure. The capitalist temptation would be to let private companies battle to see who can put more chargers in more places. But that risks creating charging deserts, the way the US already has food deserts, poor neighborhoods where grocery chains don’t bother setting up shop. Public schools in the US have a similar structural inequality: The higher the tax base, the better the local education. And since the still-nascent charging business is actually pretty bleak right now, the government will likely need to keep directing resources or subsidies to low-income communities to make sure they’re included once the EV economy booms.

Some urban areas are already experimenting with new charging strategies, each with their up- and downsides. Big cities like Los Angeles and New York City, and smaller ones like Charlotte, North Carolina, and Portland, Oregon, have swiped bright ideas from Europe and are installing chargers next to streetside spots, sometimes even on street lights. These are often cheaper to put in, because the space or pole is likely to be owned by a local utility or city, and the necessary wiring is already there. They also can be easier for drivers to access than even a charger at a gas station: Just park, plug, and walk away.

234

@Dr.Strangelove said a lot of what I was going to reply to you.

I will add that a lot of problems brought by technology can be solved by a combination of better tech and regulations. Otherwise, chronic contamination of rivers and cities would have never been reduced in the modern era. The logic you use would have meant that reaching the current levels of population in a modern city would have left us with rivers that burned and killed with all the contamination. It came close to be that in many places. But governments reacted to do a better job to clean our waterways.

The reality is that there were a lot of people in the past who said that controlling contamination in our river ways and cities would destroy the economy and make everybody poor if the problem was solved with a combination of industry and government help. The ones that said it would be impossible were wrong.

As Professor Richard Alley (who was a Republican when he made that short video) explained, just as the ones that tried to prevent the control of the contamination of our waterways were wrong, so are the ones that try to argue that we will go back to the Stone Age if we try to prevent the pollution of the air where we live and breath.

235

Are you sure you’re not being a bit over-hysterical about this? “Total disaster”? That seems like a rather extreme characterization of what is being described as a temporary standby measure that will not change Germany’s Energiewande goal of phasing out coal power generation by 2030.

Also, I think you may have misread your source, or your source was inaccurate, when you said that Germany now imports “55% of their energy in the form of natural gas from Russia”. AFAICT, Germany currently imports 63.7% of its total energy (2021 figures). Of its total primary energy consumption, 31.8% is from oil (of which 34% is imported from Russia), about 25% AFAICT is from natural gas (of which 55% is imported from Russia—which may be the figure you or your source misunderstood), 9% is from lignite (brown coal), 9% is from hard coal, 15% from renewables, and the remaining approximately 10% from nuclear and others.

So ISTM that what you think is Germany importing 55% of its total energy as natural gas from Russia is actually Germany importing 55% of its natural gas from Russia, for a total of about 14% of Germany’s total energy provided by imported natural gas from Russia.

Germany also, as I noted, gets about 11% of its total energy (34% of 32%) in the form of imported crude oil from Russia. Adding up to a total of about 25% of all German energy use derived from Russian imports.

Which is a significant amount and I’m sure that right now the Germans are wishing it were less, but it is nowhere near the 55%-of-total-energy figure that you were imagining.

236

I’ll accept that. I will correct appropriately.

237

I have heard that other countries, such as Germany, regulate when and how long you can run air conditioning in urban areas.

~Max

238

That most people in Germany don’t have air conditioning units in their homes makes that much easier.

{…} The air conditioner is so rare in Germany that only about 1% of homeowners have it installed {…}
https://www.arlingtonairconditioningheating.com/does-germany-have-air-conditioners/

239

Yeah, I don’t have air-conditioning in my apartment and I really enjoy “low utility bill season” from about April to October in consequence.

Good passive-climate-control design and ceiling fans (plus a location at nearly 43 degrees north latitude in the eastern US) make that much more workable for me, and by extension for the even more northerly Germans, than it would be for a lot of people in hotter climes.

240

Everyone will get there.