I did not mention “Yellowstone Caldera” but nice attempt to right-angle yourself out of addressing anything I actually wrote.
Stranger
Because what you describe would be political suicide. As I pointed out, people are losing their mind because gas rose a couple of dollars. At $15-20 per gallon people would riot. That would make gasoline prohibitively expensive for most Americans with no real alternative. And since everything is transported from somewhere else, that would make everything more expensive.
So what do you say to millions of voters on the verge of economic ruin because of high fuel prices?
Given the choice between a real existential crisis now vs a theoretical (even if highly probable) one in the future, most rational people will choose the later.
I’d be happy if we stopped subsidizing fossil fuels and invested more in renewables, even if that investment “skews the market”.
Would you? Or would you still be complaining about the high fuel prices? Maybe we could start by including the costs of servicing the debt for our various Middle East escapades into the price of gas.
Your drawing of an equivalence between the “existential crisis” of high fuel prices now vs. the consequences of climate change demonstrates a certain lack of understanding about the problem.
I understand the problem perfectly well. But I also understand people are not going to be willing or even able to significantly alter their lifestyle unless they have viable alternatives.
What would you be willing to do or give up in order to prevent (or mitigate at this point) climate change?
Unfortunately, I don’t really have a solution to overriding the market demands of 10 billion people.
I’ve said this before, but if you want a tariff on gas, the most palatable way to do it is to tie it to specific infrastructure developments and make it temporary. An example would be airport improvement taxes, which go to special projects then end when the project is done.
So, a $5 tax on a gallon of gas, earmarked for a specific nuclear, solar, wind or hydro project would be a lot easier to pass and sustain than a permanent tax ‘for the Earth’. And with proper controllership and reporting people could see exactly what the cost of the project is, how much money has been raised, when the project will be finished, etc. That keeps everyone’s feet to the fire and gives everyone skin in the game. So of course politicians would hate it.
But ultimately, mass transition from fossil fuels globally is not going to happen unless something better comes along. People are not going to accept serious sacrifices in perpetuity for a cause. They just aren’t. And as long as major parts of the world are not with the program, peoole will justifiably ask, "Why are we being asked to sacrifice, if it just means we’ll lose our industry to peoole who don’t, and our sacrifices simply prop them up and give them a greater comparative advantage in energy costs?
And that’s a very good question.
You said high fuel prices are an “existential crisis” and compared that vs. climate change–something that will probably kill millions. It’ll be no small number in the US alone, but it’ll be hidden in the statistics of heat stroke, extreme weather events, and so on.
I dunno, pay $0.50/kWh for electricity to facilitate the rollout of green energy, drive an EV, replace my lights with LEDs, make a regular, concerted effort to reduce vampire electricity use, minimize the amount of flying I do, buy mostly only durable goods, invest in funds dedicated to green energy, etc. Oh, I’m already doing those things. I’d certainly like to do more, but aside from reduced meat consumption (a vice, admittedly), I’m sorta running out of things to do. Aside from correcting people’s misapprehensions about EVs. That one is forever.
Why are the people who don’t not taken to task? It’s not like the US has no options.
Trump had a golden opportunity here. He adopted a protectionist economic approach under the guise of Ghina Bad. If he had an ounce of sense, he could have tied tariffs to excess emissions. He could have gathered support from Europe. And while he wouldn’t exactly have won over the masses on the left, he’d have gained some degree of support. Everyone has something to gain here.
Of course, that didn’t happen. And Biden is doing no better, but he wasn’t running on a protectionist platform and doesn’t have an easy way of selling new tariffs on that basis. He can’t even promote EVs unless the UAW has his back. Oh well.
I suppose I should also point out that conservatives are constantly trying to cancel or hobble Earth observation systems–the very systems we need to legitimately point to China (or whoever) for their emissions violations.
Today I worked on a conceptual studies (with a global team) on Hydrogen storage in Salt Caverns in the UK (as an alternative to batteries), Hydrogen blending in Natural Gas pipeline in California (already happening in Italy) and a CO2 EOR (CO2 injection in oil wells) in Canada. I feel very happy at the end of the day; but I am also aware this may go away at any moment just like it did in the mid 2000s.
Both Conservatives and Liberals have their blind spots on fossil fuels :
Conservatives (I work in the Oil Industry and many of the top leadership are conservatives) feel like this is the age old attempt by liberals to disrupt their lifestyles. There is some truth to this : Not even a decade back, some states were pushing CNG powered cars. Europe went big on CNG too. The whole program fizzled out in the US.
Liberals go after the neck they can reach. It doesn’t matter that its the marine ships that have the largest CO2 emissions, they want to go after the gasoline car manufacturers. And then the Liberals got us into Ethanol blended gasoline - which is worse for CO2 emissions. But Liberals have their share of “blind faith” too.
And on issues like CO2 sequestration, NIMBYism is prevalent in both Liberals and Conservatives. There is so much politics going around CO2 sequestration right now - no one wants it to happen near them !!!
The overall atmosphere for the Renewable Energy, though, is very positive. Granted there are distractions, but this time (compared to the 2000s) the market and investors are putting in real money for renewable power. Most companies, I know, that are in the renewables industry have orders booked for the next 5 years or more.
That’s not true. Passenger cars emit about 3 billion metric tons of CO2 per year; cargo ships are more like one billion tons.
Cargo ships are worse in terms of sulfur pollution, etc. due to their use of nasty stuff like bunker fuel. But their CO2 emissions are relatively low due to them using efficient diesel engines (among the most efficient heat engines around) and the inherent efficiency of slow water transport.
It’s enough of a problem that it also needs to be made zero-emission, but it’s not worse than passenger cars. Include trucks and all other road transport and the difference is even more drastic.
The giant agrocorps like ADM got us ethanol blended gas.
Plus, GATT has provisions that would allow for a border-adjustment for a carbon-based tax & tariff regime (though I think it would have to be levied equally on domestic & foreign producers), which would be a positive for both labor and environmentalist liberals under the Democratic tent.
I’m really shocked that this hasn’t gotten any traction in Democratic circles.
Huh, I didn’t know that there was already a framework for this. That makes it an even more obvious solution.
If Sam_Stone is right and it’s only the evil foreigners that are cheating the system, stealing our industry by not paying their share of the pollution costs, then it should not be a problem for the levies to apply to domestic sources–it’s rebalancing things exactly how you would want. Unless, of course, the idea isn’t really to be fair…
@Dr.Strangelove - These kind of discussions of blaming Liberals or Conservatives never gets us anywhere. We are in this together, and although many say its too little, too late; I’d like to be hopeful.
Here is a direct comparison of maritime versus car fleets for Europe :
For the US, which is what my post referred to, the numbers are similar but I cannot find publications in the public domain.
Including Asia in the mix distorts the numbers, but the point is that there are 4 billion cars and about 50,000 ships. In the last two decades alone, cars have become 30% more fuel efficient, largely due to the environmental movement in the US - however the shipping industry has largely managed to be untouched. A “bigger bang for the buck” so to say would be to decarbonize or reduce carbon emissions from ships instead of constantly beating on the car industry.
Just a simple google search brings up things like :
“February 2007 — Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois, the nation’s No. 2 corn-producing state, declares his candidacy for president. In his speech he hails “homegrown, alternative fuels like ethanol.” Obama is a strong supporter of passing a new, higher Renewable Fuels Standard.”
“May 2009 — President Obama’s EPA takes the first steps toward implementing the new ethanol mandate. Government experts conclude that corn ethanol is, on average, 16 percent better than gasoline when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. The law requires that new ethanol plants be 20 percent better.”
I think it’s going to be hard to compare on a per-country or per-region basis due to ships being inherently international. It’s not too surprising that ship emissions might exceed cars in Europe, due to their strong maritime tradition and fairly efficient passenger car fleet (not to mention high use of trains, etc.). But ultimately, the stuff we buy from overseas is delivered by ship, and it doesn’t matter much where it’s registered.
Unfortunately, both parties are prone to lobbying. But ethanol was coming into the mix before Obama:
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 gave us the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which mandated that an increasing amount of ethanol had to be blended into the fuel supply. In 2007 those mandates were expanded. This bill directly enabled the 17 billion gallon per year ethanol industry in the U.S. that still helps fuel our automobiles today.
Absolutely. I had ADM as a client from around 2003 until 2006; they were extremely active from a lobbying perspective, and corn ethanol as motor fuel was a big part of that, even then.
Fully agree. And also from your own link :
“President Bush pursued a hydrogen economy, but he was ahead of his time. A hydrogen economy failed to materialize at that time, but hydrogen is currently experiencing a renaissance as an attractive low-carbon transportation fuel.”
Lets be rational and give due credit to Republicans for pursuing the Hydrogen economy, way back then.
Too much of a stretch for me. Even today, the hydrogen economy is just the fossil fuel economy, and pushing hydrogen is just a way to keep the oil companies relevant. It doesn’t always have to be the case–I do think there’s a place for hydrogen in the future, powered by electrolysis from wind/solar/nuclear–but it’s still a ways out. Right now, and certainly back in the Bush era, electric ground transport would have been the right move.
It is if you’re about to be homeless.
This deserves a separate discussion by itself. Switching to Hydrogen is a chicken and egg problem : Infrastructure wont be there unless there is demand, and demand wont be there unless there is infrastructure. A lot of government and private investment is happening to change that. Some I can highlight here
- Toyota has released the Mirai Hydrogen fueled car, in California. Essentially an electric car with a fuel cell in place of the battery. It has a range of 357 miles and refueling is complete in 3 minutes; removing range anxiety common with electric cars.
- Hyundai and Hyzon has hydrogen fueled trucks in Europe.
- Around 4 GW of Solar Energy is used in the NEOM Saudi Arabia project, to make hydrogen. This hydrogen is then used as a fuel either by ammonia (buses already exists) or just as hydrogen.
- Canada has very active Hydrogen Grid programs with programs going on in Edmonton and Alberta. These are paired with CO2 sequestration
- Just earlier this month the DOE gave half a billion dollars of guarantee to a hydrogen storage in salt caverns project in Utah.
- I can go on and on but not sure if that will convince you
I think this year’s IPCC report maybe the best to convince you to that we are slowly moving away from the fossil fuel economy. See the simplified IPCC report here, C: Adaptation Measures and Enabling Conditions and i quote 
"Progress in adaptation planning and implementation has been observed across all sectors and regions, generating multiple benefits (very high confidence). However, adaptation progress is unevenly distributed with observed adaptation gaps40 (high confidence). Many initiatives prioritize immediate and near-term climate risk reduction which reduces the opportunity for transformational adaptation"
Right. Are there any hydrogen refueling stations outside California? Last time i checked, there weren’t but perhaps I’m behind on my hydrogen news.
And what color is the hydrogen they’re delivering? If it’s not green, it’s just moving the carbon emissions to somewhere else. Even blue hydrogen is not all that great, since they have to emit a bunch more CO2 to sequester it. And if it is green hydrogen, it’s being way less efficient just to avoid some range anxiety.†
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† From various readings, I gather that range anxiety is much more common in people who don’t own an EV but are considering getting one. The people who do own one have found that it’s rarely an issue.
Sure, if you want or need to use a “light” bulb partly for heat as well as for light, then that changes your criteria for “light” bulb performance.
Market-fundamentalist claptrap. Of course no plan, governmental or corporate or any other kind, can predict and take into account all possible ramifications of complexity and unknowns. Which is why plans, governmental or corporate or any other kind, should have flexibility and robustness built into them instead of trying to decree every possible outcome in advance. But the notion that the vague buzzword of “markets” somehow automatically makes the problems of handling real-world complexity disappear is merely an antigovernment article of faith, not a description of reality.