[peacetreefrog]

We need a carbon tax stat IMO. Economist John Cochrane had a good blog post about this recently (I actually posted to HN a few days ago but it got buried):

https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2019/05/ip-on-carbon-tax....

From the end:

"Climate policy was headed to this kind of bipartisan technocratic resolution in the 1990s before it became a tool of partisan warfare. The challenge, from both sides, is to remove the political baggage that climate policy has accumulated."

He then makes that appeal to both sides:

"To my climate-skeptic friends: Given that the government is going to regulate carbon, this is the way to do it with least damage. To my green-warrior friends, if the government is actually going to reduce carbon, not just subsidize cronies and engage in worthless value-signaling gestures, a trade of carbon taxes for absurdly costly regulations and subsidies is the only way to get anywhere."

[mieseratte]

> To my climate-skeptic friends: Given that the government is going to regulate carbon, this is the way to do it with least damage.

First, that starts off with a false premise. You don't know that the government is going to regulate carbon.

Second, ignoring the "climate change is a myth" crowd, there are those that believe that we are, at this point, past the point of helping and that we might as well just get on with it and adapt to whatever changes await. That attempts at regulation will just destroy the economy, and thus their place in it, and that ruining the economy and thus untold (b|m)illions of lives that way is not worth the unknown outcome of attempting to save the current state of climate.

This isn't even a "not my problem" situation. I've heard this from folks leaving in a coastal region that already suffers some amount of regular nuisance flooding. It's not as if rising tides will skip over them.

Failing to understand that viewpoint is going to result in two sides yelling past each other. One side thinks we must do everything in our power to preserve nature's status-quo, the other is firmly of the mind that it is an impossibility and to try would be wasted effort with much risk and unclear gain.

Your first task is convincing them of the horrors that await for them.

[esotericn]

> there are those that believe that we are, at this point, past the point of helping and that we might as well just get on with it and adapt to whatever changes await

Pricing in externalities is a part of that adaptation. It literally is "getting on with it".

It's unclear to me what you mean by this.

If your farm is on fire, maybe you lose a room. OK, so you adapt. Perhaps you'll never earn enough again to rebuild it properly. You might be a bit traumatised - maybe you buy more smoke alarms, cameras, sprinklers, stuff like that.

What you don't do is set the whole thing alight, burn it to hell, and adapt to the changes having contributed to your life savings going up in smoke.

If a family member or close friend dies - you hang out with friends, you go to therapy. You certainly don't buy some weapons and decide to finish off the rest of your friends for good measure!

A climate that continuously changes by a few degrees every decade is going to be impossible to adapt to properly. We will effectively never be able to build permanent structures again.

What's the goal here? 800ppm? 1200? Literally just whack the thermostat up 10c and have every city in the world suddenly be in the wrong place?

> attempts at regulation will just destroy the economy, and thus their place in it, and that ruining the economy and thus untold (b|m)illions of lives that way

It's unclear to me why pricing in externalities would do this.

Shifting consumption to more efficient "happiness/usefulness per damage" stuff wouldn't ruin anything.

It's difficult for me to understand why people would think that carbon pricing pushing people towards different foods or smaller cars or cycling or whatever would "destroy the economy". I think they have a different definition of the word 'destroy'. Consuming a bit less is not destruction. Your hometown being underwater is a destroyed economy.

[FrojoS]

> are those that believe that we are, at this point, past the point of helping and that we might as well just get on with it and adapt to whatever changes await.

This makes no sense at all. Climate change is not a binary effect, it's compounding.

[dmm]

> there are those that believe that we are, at this point, past the point of helping and that we might as well just get on with it and adapt

Climate change is inevitable but the amount of change can still be affected. Preventing carbon emissions now will absolutely be cheaper that paying for mitigations in the future.

The amount of warming is very important. An increase from 1.5C to 2.0C will kill an additional 100 million people from air pollution alone.

[bryanlarsen]

To the second: even if stopping climate change is impossible, slowing it is tremendously valuable.

[peacetreefrog]

The government is already is regulating carbon. California has a cap and trade program, for example, and this court case in 2007 forced the EPA "to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) as pollutants."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_v._Environmental...

[zajio1am]

I agree that we need a carbon tax. IMHO the good way to get wider support for it is to make it revenue-neutral - collected money could be distributed equally as income tax credit (or some other way).

In this way carbon tax would increas marginal costs of using carbon-intensive products, but does not increase overall taxation.

[WanderPanda]

I would rather like a carbon market where every person gets the same amount of emissions per year and can then sell this towards manufacturers using fossil carbon. This gets the notion of "the air we breath belongs to all of us" way better than shoveling even more money to the government

[saeranv]

Trudeau has done this in Canada. I, like you, thought it would be a brilliant way to get around the traditional conservative opposition to taxes, but surprisingly - they still opposed it, and provincial conservatives have challenged it in the courts.

[saeranv]

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that this is not something that "both sides" are equally responsible for. In Canada/US, conservatives/Republicans generally refuse to implement a carbon tax; whereas the center-left and left parties generally do. Additionally in the US, the Republicans don't even believe in climate-change.

Hence Chomsky's argument that the Republican party is the most dangerous organisation in human history: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/noam-choms...

So I agree we need carbon tax, but I find it frustrating to pretend this is a issue both sides are at fault for.

[peacetreefrog]

Well, depends what you mean by "at fault". I agree it's better to believe in global warming than deny it exists, but I agree with Cochrane that many of the attempts at at fixing it so far are basically "worthless value-signaling gestures".

Cochrane thinks (not sure I agree with him) that the onus right now is more on the traditional left than the right.

"...climate policy advocates have gone far beyond a technocratic idea of simply, well, reducing carbon. 'And nuclear energy' is usually noticeably absent. Carbon capture technologies, equally good at reducing carbon are usually noticeably absent. Other agendas like 'climate justice' creep in -- worthy or not, anything else that creeps in means less carbon reduction per dollar. A carbon tax reduces carbon any way that reduces carbon, which is really good at, well, reducing carbon, and not getting distracted with other agendas. That is a strong reason why carbon taxes, and especially such taxes in return for less regulation are resisted on the left."

Whether you agree re: who is at fault, given that most people on HN are prob on the "do something about climate change" end of the spectrum, if you are personally skeptical of a carbon tax vs something like the green new deal or Jay Inslee's climate change plan, I'd encourage you to look into it more.

Cochrane's blog post and and also this would be good places to start:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/17/this-is-n...

[rayiner]

The Democrats are willing to make slight changes, but at the end of the day, Americans are pumping 15-20 gigs tons per year of CO2 into the atmosphere and that number wouldn’t change under either Democrat or Republican policies. (Indeed, its not clear that when you account for Democrats’ opposition to nuclear power, which set of policies would’ve led to lower CO2 output in a counterfactual scenario.) And to keep warming to 1.5C, that number needs to go to zero this decade, then negative shortly after that. Also, this needs to happen in china and India, not just the US.

Note that measures to actually address climate change are unpopular even among Democrats. Sure, they like it when it’s articulated as a jobs program (“green new deal”) but they still oppose things like carbon taxes, which experts have offered forth as the solution. State level measures along those lines got strong push back in very blue and very environmentally conscious Oregon and Washington

[Bendingo]

> pretend this is a issue both sides are at fault for

I'm sorry but there is no doubt that "both sides are at fault".

"Trudeau has never really stood in the way of Canada’s oil industry, despite years of platitudes about addressing climate change."

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Trudeau-Declares-...

[perfunctory]

> We need a carbon tax stat IMO.

Good idea. How do we make it happen?

[bryanlarsen]

Having the top voted comment on a popular HN thread is a start. As you yourself mentioned, this kind of change requires change at the grass roots.

[dennisgorelik]

Tax increase makes people poorer. Poverty kills people.

Most likely effect of carbon tax is that it will kill more people than it will save.

[psychometry]

This is some South Park Chewbacca defense-level logic.

[bryanlarsen]

Taxes move money, they don't destroy it. They make some people richer and some poorer. A carbon tax and dividend scheme (advocated by economists) gives poor people a significant amount of money. The Green New Deal (advocated by left wing democrats) gives poor people a significant amount of money.