[HN Gopher] I liked the idea of carbon offsets until I tried to ...
___________________________________________________________________
I liked the idea of carbon offsets until I tried to explain it
Author : gk1
Score : 322 points
Date : 2022-04-11 13:29 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (climateer.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (climateer.substack.com)
| robbrown451 wrote:
| The "but what if everyone did it?" argument doesn't make sense
| and shows a lack of understanding of basic supply and demand.
|
| The more people want to buy credits, and the fewer people willing
| to sell them, the more the price goes up. If someone is willing
| to pay me $100 to walk a mile to work, I'm going to walk a mile
| to work. Jeff Bezos probably won't, but that's ok.
|
| The point is, the price will stabilize at an equilibrium. If this
| sort of thing didn't work, our whole market economy would
| collapse almost immediately.
| intrasight wrote:
| I'm with the majority of economists who say "tax carbon". Still
| complex technically and politically, but more effective in
| solving the problem.
| em500 wrote:
| Here's the economic argument against, from conservative
| economist John Cochrane (try to check the tribalism and focus
| on the arguments), who used to be a proponent of carbon taxes.
|
| _The standard vision in policy discussions assumes infinite
| substitutability. As soon as the cost of clean energy is lower
| than the cost of carbon-emitting energy, everyone substitutes
| completely to the latter and the oil and coal stay in the
| ground. This is the key question. What the graphs make clear is
| that the majority of carbon must stay in the ground (or go back
| there) if we want to avoid a large temperature rise. (Again, I
| do not quibble with the climate side of the models here.
| Whether the large temperature rise actually hurts GDP is a
| separate issue, which I 'll return to in the next post.) But as
| long as the elasticity of substitution is finite, as here, then
| the carbon comes out of the ground. As you use less and less,
| the remaining uses become more and more valuable, so it's worth
| it, privately and to society, to keep using it although at
| lower scale._
|
| This follows from a model that implies that even extremely high
| carbon taxes will only post-pone 4 degrees temperature rise by
| 50 years or so.
|
| _So I learn from this that a key focus for R &D is not so much
| on lowering the cost of alternatives, but increasing their
| substitutability for fossil fuels. Just because the cost of
| solar cells is plummeting does us little good. We need to
| increase their substitutability. This consideration once again
| points to nuclear and carbon capture and storage as really
| important technologies. We're really talking about how to
| replace coal-fired base-load electric plants in parts of the
| world that badly need electricity. Nuclear and capture and
| storage, though they might not be the least expensive, seem to
| offer much better substitutability options. That both are
| forbidden topics in climate debates is sad. Substitution also
| involves other large carbon emitters. It's hard to make steel
| and concrete without emitting lots of carbon.
|
| This thought emphasizes a point that Bjorn Lomborg hammered
| away on in many different ways during a previous presentation:
| Simply making carbon more expensive will not work._
|
| https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2021/07/rossi-hansberg-on...
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I'm not sure why Cochrane's so obsessed with using taxation
| (oh - he's an economist. OK.)
|
| Most fossil-fuel burning is going on in power plants. By
| diverting power generation to renewables, you remove the
| demand; fossil fuel prices fall, prospecting falls,
| extraction falls.
|
| Yes, I know, there's flight, shipping and personal
| transportation. But power generation is most of it. And I'd
| just like to see less flight, shipping and personal
| transportation.
| EcoMonkey wrote:
| I am not an economist, but I'll point out that all of these
| economists would respectfully disagree with John Cochrane:
| https://www.econstatement.org/
|
| Including 28 Nobel laureates, former Federal Reserve
| chairpeople, and a few thousand other economists.
|
| But intuitively, I do agree that simply making carbon more
| expensive won't work. You have to take the money and inject
| it back into the economy in a way that alleviates the
| regressive nature of a plain carbon tax while making the
| revenue available to boost the low-carbon economy. Carbon
| dividends, if you trust most economists, is the most
| efficient way to do that.
| intrasight wrote:
| I do agree with John Cochrane about substitutability. And
| that's the transition to electric transport is so important.
| kitkat_new wrote:
| you need to pay out the earnings of the tax to the population
| again. This way the population easily can substitute
| consumption with usually more expensive alternatives
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| > only post-pone 4 degrees temperature rise by 50 years or
| so.
|
| This sounds awesome. How is this an argument against?
|
| I don't understand the substitutability argument. Yes, we
| need to spend a lot of effort making non-carbon mechanisms to
| substitute for carbon mechanism. To do that, we need an
| incentive for this research. The carbon tax is a good
| incentive.
|
| Carbon tax is also politically neutral -- it doesn't care
| whether you substitute with nuclear, carbon capture or
| something prettier.
|
| Got any more arguments for a carbon tax disguised as
| arguments against it?
| Hjfrf wrote:
| Maybe it would be simpler at an international level rather than
| for individual companies?
|
| E.g. based on last year's co2 vs rolling 5 years average,
| calculated by weather satellites rather than self-reported.
|
| I've got no idea how gdp would be taken into account though.
| Enclaves and disputed borders are also less clear.
| EcoMonkey wrote:
| Yale's Climate Opinion Maps[0] would suggest that more
| Americans than not are with the majority of economists, also.
| It gets less complex politically when you pair it with carbon
| dividends, which return the revenue back to households.
|
| It's also fun to compare the effectiveness of pricing carbon
| with other solutions using En-ROADS [1], built by MIT and
| Climate Interactive.
|
| However, this is a national policy thing that requires our
| direct participation in politics. Our elected officials need to
| be hearing about this from an increasing number of citizens
| and, frankly, be put into a position of worrying about their
| re-election chances if they don't support it (and other robust
| climate policy).
|
| [0] https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-
| data/yc... (look for "Require fossil fuel companies to pay a
| carbon tax")
|
| [1] https://en-
| roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=22.4...
| peder wrote:
| Unless govts become addicted to carbon tax revenue, in which
| case they may allow the same level of carbon emissions anyway.
| eutropia wrote:
| avoid the addiction by turning it directly into a citizen's
| dividend
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| This is what Canada is doing. Equal rebates for everyone -
| use less and you get a subsidy, use more and you're the one
| doing the subsidizing.
|
| Now of course Canada's carbon tax is tiny, but there's
| probably some behavioural economics rationale behind the
| idea that even a tiny cost can have outsized impact on
| behaviour.
| transcriptase wrote:
| Rebates for people in certain provinces. Others have
| implemented a cap-and-trade shell game where the
| residents receive nothing but they still experience
| rising prices because of costs to nation-wide businesses
| being passed on either way.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| Shamefully, I've committed the cardinal sin of people
| from my province: forgetting the other 60% of my
| countrymen and forgetting that things do vary between
| provinces.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| The more you tax something, the less of it you get. Imposing
| a non-zero cost on carbon will always be strictly better at
| reducing carbon emissions than imposing a zero cost on it.
| How effective it is depends on how big a tax it is, of
| course, but usually governments addicted to a tax tend to
| increase said tax, which in this case makes it better, since
| it will disincentivize emissions even more.
| dont__panic wrote:
| Curious, can you link to any reading on this subject? The
| canonical high-tax situation I think of is income tax in
| NYS and CA, and it seems that has only pushed prices and
| incomes UP, rather than down. But maybe it works
| differently for income tax because physical work locations
| are not truly competitive across location and most folks
| have visas, schools, family, friends, etc. pinning them to
| a location and reducing flexibility.
| thecage411 wrote:
| What is the basis for the claim that income tax in NYS
| and CA pushed prices and income up? This seems extremely
| unlikely, unless you are looking at pretax income or
| something.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| Canada's "carbon pricing" (the government tries to avoid the
| word "tax" due to its negative connotations) is designed to
| be almost revenue-neutral to avoid this exact problem. 90% of
| the money is rebated directly to the people. The other 10% is
| used to fund green projects.
|
| https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/personal-
| finance/t...
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| >Those payments mean that around 80 per cent of households
| receive a payment that more than covers annual carbon
| costs; the other 20 per cent are higher-income households
| that have bigger carbon bills, and so end up being out of
| pocket.
|
| This claim in the article is directly contradicted by the
| Canadian government.
|
| >Indeed, most households will see a net loss resulting from
| federal carbon pricing under the HEHE plan in 2030-31
| (Table 3-2). That is, their overall costs--which now
| include the federal levy and GST paid (fiscal impact) and
| lower employment and investment income (economic
| impact)--exceed the rebate and the induced reduction in
| personal income taxes arising from the loss in income.
|
| https://www.pbo-dpb.gc.ca/en/blog/news/RP-2122-032-S--
| distri...
| kitkat_new wrote:
| I think the former is more likely to be true.
|
| If 100% of the money went back, you'd get back equal (or
| more) what you paid, if you are responsible for the
| average (or less of the same) of CO2 production per
| citizen.
|
| Since there are many more poor people than there are rich
| people which are responsible for disproportional much
| more emission, the people below the average are the
| majority
|
| Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/
| 04/carbon-f...
|
| Only paying back 90% generates a small shift into the
| other direction though
| allemagne wrote:
| Most Canadian households _do_ get back more than what
| they paid.
|
| The way that there are net losses to households is by
| calculating the "economic costs" of lost investment and
| jobs. This is exactly what carbon taxes are meant to do:
| internalize the externalized costs of burning fossil
| fuels.
| allemagne wrote:
| No, the two claims are not at all inconsistent.
| Households _are_ seeing more money than they would
| otherwise, which was the point of the comment you 're
| replying to. See page 10 of your link:
|
| >Taking into account only the fiscal, or "use-side"
| impacts, we project most households will see a net gain,
| receiving more in rebates from federal carbon pricing
| under the Government's HEHE than the total amount they
| pay in federal fuel charges (directly and indirectly).
|
| The quote you're pulling specifically factors in a
| projected "economic impact" of lost investment, which it
| compares to the "fiscal impact". The economic impact is
| precisely the point. The fiscal impact is how to make the
| medicine go down.
|
| It would be great news if we can sacrifice some economic
| growth in the short term in order to create a potentially
| popular wealth transfer program that also efficiently
| disincentivizes burning fossil fuels. If this approach
| can be scaled up, then the economic losses incurred will
| be outweighed several times over by averting climate
| change catastrophe. That's the whole idea.
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the politicians and
| the media never mention the economic impact cost of this
| plan, and only tout the rebate.
|
| >It would be great news if we can sacrifice some economic
| growth
|
| The bank of Canada is projecting "significant
| macroeconomic consequences, touching every region and
| sector" and "asset values across the financial system
| could be subject to sharp declines in valuation, which
| might generate credit and market losses, and it might
| increase the stress on the financial system".
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/bank-canada-plans-
| new-t...
| allemagne wrote:
| The Bank of Canada also seems to recognize the economic
| costs of doing nothing. Full context of both your quotes:
|
| >"Climate change and the transition to a low-carbon net
| zero economy will have significant macroeconomic
| consequences, touching every region and sector of the
| Canadian and global economies," the bank said in a
| statement tied to the United Nations' COP26 global
| climate summit in Scotland.
|
| And:
|
| >Separately, Bank of Canada Deputy Governor Toni Gravelle
| said the steps needed to mitigate the effects of global
| warming would lead to massive restructuring and the risk
| that some parts of the economy would shrink.
|
| >"Asset values across the financial system could be
| subject to sharp declines in valuation, which might
| generate credit and market losses, and it might increase
| the stress on the financial system," he told a climate
| panel in Toronto.
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| >The Bank of Canada also seems to recognize the economic
| costs of doing nothing
|
| Nothing in that quote mentioned anything about the cost
| of doing nothing.
| allemagne wrote:
| Yes, they do. From both quotes (emphasis mine):
|
| >"_Climate change and_ the transition to a low-carbon net
| zero economy will have significant macroeconomic
| consequences ... "
|
| >Separately, Bank of Canada Deputy Governor Toni Gravelle
| said the steps _needed to mitigate the effects of global
| warming_ ...
| gruez wrote:
| >Indeed, most households will see a net loss resulting
| from federal carbon pricing under the HEHE plan in
| 2030-31 (Table 3-2). That is, their overall costs--which
| now include the federal levy and GST paid (fiscal impact)
| and lower employment and investment income (economic
| impact)--exceed the rebate and the induced reduction in
| personal income taxes arising from the loss in income.
|
| Where's that money going? Administering the program?
| Being taken by the government as tax revenue?
| allemagne wrote:
| From a pure fiscal standpoint, there is still a net gain
| to most households.
|
| The net loss here is calculated by subtracting the
| "economic cost" of lost investment and jobs due to carbon
| pricing. This is kind of the point; you would probably
| expect industries that are more fossil fuel intensive to
| be taking a hit if carbon taxes are doing what we want
| them to do.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| At this stage I'm starting to think that we'll need either:
|
| - a drastic societal change or, - stumble upon an ancient
| alien artefact progressing our technology to the point where
| coal becomes useless
|
| (digging a giant hole in my backyard with the hope of finding
| a Stargate whilst writing this comment)
|
| Edit: morbid humour and sarcasm aside, the sibling comments
| provide some context on why taxing carbon might actually work
| paganel wrote:
| > I'm with the majority of economists
|
| If the majority of economists really do say that then I guess
| the only solution is to not tax carbon, or, at the very least,
| to not do what a "majority of dismal scientists" suggest. Over
| here in Europe we're still feeling the political and societal
| effects of the austerity measures introduced after 2008-2010,
| measures which were strongly supported by the majority of
| economists back then.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| The problem is that we can't seem to tax _anything_ from
| companies with more than a certain level of resources, since
| they can just use shell corporations and loopholes to avoid
| them.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| I think it pays to be more specific. Carbon is a generic term
| that can include all carbon-based lifeforms, including humans.
| Also, taxing normal people for CO2 emissions just gives more
| money to the people who designed these systems in the first
| place.
| allemagne wrote:
| If you tax CO2 emissions by everyone, and then distribute the
| money equally among the population, normal people end up with
| more money afterwards because they tend to emit less CO2 than
| rich people.
|
| It is also better at reducing emissions, because then less
| CO2-intensive options become cheaper than the alternative.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| And who will be in charge of making sure that happens?
| allemagne wrote:
| Sounds like you have a great method of shooting down
| ideas based on something besides their own merits.
| intrasight wrote:
| I should get a tax credit - for being mostly sequestered
| carbon ;)
| karaterobot wrote:
| Clarification question: when you say you're with the majority
| of economists who say "tax carbon", are you implying that the
| majority of economists conclude you should tax carbon in some
| form? Or are you saying that you agree with most of the
| economists who do, whether or not they are a majority?
| intrasight wrote:
| I am implying that the majority of economists conclude you
| should tax carbon in some form. I am in the minority of non-
| economists who agree with that consensus.
| willcipriano wrote:
| The political problem is the hard part. People hear tax carbon
| and think "finally, those big SUVs and trucks I hate will be
| taxed!" and don't think "my annual international travel will
| become unaffordable" but that is more likely the outcome if you
| tax all carbon equally. The reality is people want to tax other
| peoples carbon and that's more like class/urban vs rural
| warfare than anything to do with the environment.
|
| For me the pragmatic approach is to assume that the third world
| isn't going to become carbon neutral anytime soon so we are
| better off preparing for the inevitability of climate change
| rather than trying to prevent it. Sadly things like large scale
| geoengineering projects, genetic modification of local flora to
| support the new climate and other pragmatic measures aren't
| palatable to the crowd most worried about climate change.
| intrasight wrote:
| My belief is the same. But I also believe that geo-
| engineering projects will become palatable when weighed
| against the alternatives.
| dTal wrote:
| I think the key insight that's missing in these discussions is
| we need to tax carbon _at the point of extraction_ , not at the
| point of consumption. We need to make mines and wells
| unsustainably expensive to operate. If people really need oil,
| they'll find ways to manufacture it more cheaply from biowaste.
|
| The trouble is that this is a Hard Problem because a huge
| fraction of the world's carbon is extracted in or by countries
| whose geopolitical standing would be crushed by this. But
| unless we do this, the same amount of carbon will ultimately be
| extracted and subsequently burned by _somebody_.
|
| (Also when push comes to shove nobody actually gives a shit
| about any of this, and any politician who deliberately does
| anything to raise fuel prices will find their head on a pike)
| losvedir wrote:
| Taxing at the point of extraction or consumption should be
| equivalent, right? No one extracts for the sheer fun of it.
|
| It seems to me we could take a page out of Europe's VAT book
| which is ultimately paid by the consumer but tracks the
| "value added" throughout the supply chain from raw resources
| to finished goods.
| Groxx wrote:
| I think it's mostly that one is fairly easy to track, the
| other is nightmarishly hard and also easy to evade.
|
| Main problem with at-production is that not all
| consumptions are equal, and it puts the cost equally on
| all.
| jollybean wrote:
| " If people really need oil, they'll find ways to manufacture
| it more cheaply from biowaste."
|
| What? No.
|
| We don't care about the extraction.
|
| If oil must be burned, don't care whether it's Oil from wells
| or Oil from biowaste.
|
| If it's oil for burning an engine, and we need that engine to
| operate for some economic reason - then we actually want
| people to consume the cheapest version.
|
| We don't want to make people jump through hurdles to 'run an
| engine that we need to run' for no reason.
|
| We may want to make sure that running that engine is
| economically essential, in which case keeping prices high,
| or, by some regulation.
|
| The act of 'extraction' is not a problem, there's not much
| negative from that.
|
| Other than geostrategic issues (i.e. Russia) we don't care
| where it comes from.
|
| What we want to do is tax the fuel itself - not emissions.
|
| The emissions are a direct function of the fuel.
|
| We know X litres of gas will create Y tonnes for Co2 and
| that's it. So tax the fuel instead of getting people to
| figure out emissions.
|
| Oil that is used for other reasons, we don't really care
| about.
|
| We could put a fuel tax, and a natural gas tax up right now -
| we already have mechanisms in place for that.
| nix0n wrote:
| > We don't care about the extraction
|
| For carbon-reduction purposes maybe not, but fracking does
| create its own problems.
| dTal wrote:
| >If oil must be burned, don't care whether it's Oil from
| wells or Oil from biowaste.
|
| Yes, we really do. There is vastly more carbon in the
| atmosphere than a hundred years ago. _Where did it come
| from_?
|
| You can burn oil made from biowaste all day and all night
| and it won't raise CO2 levels one little bit. Why? Because
| all that carbon came from the atmosphere to begin with! All
| the carbon in living things comes from plants, who get it
| from atmospheric CO2. It's a closed cycle.
|
| The problem is solely, 100%, taking carbon that has been
| safely in the ground for millions of years, and through a
| convoluted process putting it in the atmosphere and never
| retrieving it. And then being shocked that atmospheric CO2
| levels are returning to what they were millions of years
| ago, in the period aptly known as the "Carboniferous".
| jollybean wrote:
| Oh, no, this is flawed reasoning. Sorry.
|
| "You can burn oil made from biowaste all day and all
| night and it won't raise CO2 levels one little bit. Why?
| Because all that carbon came from the atmosphere to begin
| with! All the carbon in living things comes from plants,
| who get it from atmospheric CO2. It's a closed cycle."
|
| Oil comes from plants and animals, crushed under the
| weight of the earth, it's also a 'natural cycle' - but
| that doesn't matter at all.
|
| "The problem is solely, 100%, taking carbon that has been
| safely in the ground for millions of years, a"
|
| No, it has nothing to do with that at all.
|
| It doesn't matter where or how the carbon gets into the
| air.
|
| Anything that is going to be used as a fuel, we tax,
| relative to the amount of CO2 it emits, and that's that.
|
| If as it turns out it's incredibly more efficient to burn
| 'biofuel' than it is to extract Oil - fine. But it's
| probably not the case.
| oehpr wrote:
| As a sideline on this conversation. I'm VERY interested
| in dTal's point and if it stands up to scrutiny. To me,
| it makes sense. The carbon in the air now is from carbon
| that _was sequestered_. It _was_ in oil, it _was_ in
| trees, it _was_ in the rocks. Then we let it go. We
| drilled oil, cut down the trees and burned them and built
| them, we made concrete.
|
| So. If you take carbon out of the ground, and expect to
| see it floating in the air, you should be taxed. That's
| the idea.
|
| But does this make sense? Just how much of the carbon in
| oil really is destined for the air? How much of the wood?
| How much of the stone? Or is there some other chain I'm
| missing? How much carbon would be sequestered in plants
| that produce biofuel? How much of a net negative is
| ethonol production anyway? What about other fuels? This
| subject seems complex to me.
|
| You seem to think all this is wrong, and it could be! I
| really would be interested to hear where the logic breaks
| down.
| c1ccccc1 wrote:
| It depends on what would happen to the biowaste
| otherwise. Probably if the waste isn't turned into fuel,
| it will just rot and release the carbon anyways. In that
| case, it wouldn't make sense to tax the fuel. It only
| makes sense if the carbon would otherwise be safely
| stored and kept from going into the atmosphere.
| datagram wrote:
| Their point is that nowadays carbon from dead plants and
| animals generally gets recirculated, but this wasn't
| always the case. Back before the enzymes to break down
| lignin and cellulose existed, when trees died the carbon
| they had extracted from the atmosphere didn't
| recirculate. And if we hadn't started digging up fossil
| fuels and burning them, that carbon would have remained
| buried basically forever. So where the oil comes from
| does matter.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous#Fungi
| namdnay wrote:
| why? we tax cigarettes at the point of consumption and that
| has worked fine.
| dTal wrote:
| Because you should tax the thing you want to stop. Burning
| carbon is absolutely fine, provided the carbon originally
| came from the atmosphere and not buried deposits. It's the
| open-loop cycle that's the problem. The moment you dig it
| up, eventually it's bound for atmosphere. You want to
| financially encourage the development of "green" petroleum
| - nobody will bother if it's taxed all the same.
|
| Also, if you try and individually tax the hundreds of
| thousands of different uses for carbon, according to how
| much carbon each thing uses, inevitably you'll get it
| wrong, and this will create inefficiencies and perverse
| incentives to do arbitrage between the various poorly
| calibrated taxes. What you want is for the market to figure
| it all out!
| thargor90 wrote:
| Supply chains are not 100% transparent.
|
| We know how bad one unit of "cigarette" is for our health,
| but we don't know how bad one unit of xxx is for the
| environment. An apple can have a co2 footprint of multiple
| tons of co2 or zero tons of co2. We can't know for sure.
| initplus wrote:
| Products don't come with a label measuring how much oil was
| burned in their production. Even if the manufacturer wanted
| to know, tracing that detail through their entire supply
| chain is really difficult. Preventing fraud is also very
| challenging.
|
| Whereas if you tax at extraction this is automatically take
| into account at every step of the supply chain. The market
| does all the hard work for you.
| afarrell wrote:
| It would need to be at the point of extraction or
| importation. Then you'd need tax treaties with countries who
| are adopting similar policies.
| intrasight wrote:
| Carbon is a global problem indeed. The most global I would
| say. So clearly we can't have such a tax be only on local
| production. Makes me wonder if Bitcoin could play a role.
| tombert wrote:
| Ok, I'll bite...how exactly does this have anything to do
| with bitcoin?
| intrasight wrote:
| I don't. Only connection is that they are both global
| problems ;)
| jollybean wrote:
| Help me with this.
|
| Why not just tax the fuel?
|
| Measuring carbon emissions has to be a pain.
|
| But we know pretty much what emits carbon, it's the gas or oil.
|
| Pick a spot in the carbon value chain that's closer to the
| source and tax that.
|
| It's a bit crude, but maybe more accurate than measuring
| emissions.
| wmf wrote:
| Yes, this is the way.
| rob74 wrote:
| I was kind of expecting some of the stuff in this article, but I
| was actually amazed that he was able to demonstrate the absurdity
| of carbon offsets without even getting into sticky topics like
| corruption (i.e. you pay for a tree to be planted which never
| gets planted, or the m2 of rainforest you "protected" doesn't get
| cut down today, but in one month).
|
| Someone has described carbon offsets as modern-day indulgences
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence) - you pay someone to
| "wash away" your CO2-emitting "sins", and the less you think
| about how it works, the better you can feel about it...
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Yeah. Because there is a moralistic view that there is no way
| out--humans are evil and must atone. Any market-based or tech-
| based approach cannot work because we are dealing with sins.
|
| A lot of armchair environmentalists have this view.
| yeetsfromhellL2 wrote:
| Serious question I have about carbon offests with respect to
| forestry. If you pay me money to not cut my trees and they all
| burn up in a fire, do you lose your carbon credits, and if so,
| do I owe you a refund?
| skybrian wrote:
| > Suppose all of the world's cement plant operators agreed to
| offset their emissions this way. Suppose that this succeeds so
| well that 100% of the world's remaining rainforests are protected
| forever. We're still nowhere near net zero!
|
| This is true, but as a side effect you've saved the rainforests,
| which would be amazing!
|
| Maybe we shouldn't judge the worth of a carbon offets scheme
| solely by carbon emissions? It can be kind of dubious and still
| have good side effects.
| ComradePhil wrote:
| Dr. Shiva Ayurdhari explained this and more 5 years ago when
| Trump got out of the Paris accord:
| https://www.pscp.tv/va_shiva/1yoKMBMPeNnGQ
| fallingfrog wrote:
| I agree with the author, carbon offsets are a scam. They are
| equivalent to buying indulgences from the church. Now, the big
| question is, what public figures are promoting carbon offsets?
| It's not easy to figure out, but the usual suspects (oil
| companies) seem to be involved. Along with politicians who take
| donations from the same.
| gwd wrote:
| The idea I've seen with the "cap and trade" is that you use the
| money to, say, help a factory in a developing country install
| more expensive, less carbon-emitting equipment -- equipment which
| may not have been economical for them to do without the subsidy.
| That helps reduce emissions for the lifetime of that factory, as
| well as encouraging the development of lower-carbon technology
| overall.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| Yes the idea is perfectly sensible, the issue is that such
| schemes are probably a practical impossibility for humans to
| implement and police in a such a way that we achieve the goals
| or reducing co2 output, rather than just achieving a way for
| people to game the system for profit.
|
| Even if everyone involved operated with good faith, even
| accounting accurately for the co2 externalities accurately is
| very difficult, and you can be sure a huge percentage of people
| will not be acting in good faith.
| unholiness wrote:
| Notably this article is about offsets, not cap and trade.
|
| Cap and trade is fundamentally different from offsets in that
| there is a central authority who decides precisely what caps
| every company gets before trading starts, so every transaction
| which increases one company's cap by 1 ton is guaranteed to
| decrease another's.
|
| Offsets are a decentralized attempt to quantify how various
| actions would lower the world's carbon output compared to some
| estimate of what would happen otherwise. The cheapest offsets
| prey on this ambiguity in the various ways the article
| suggestions.
|
| The other big difference is that cap and trade is mandatory
| while offsets are optional. There is so little offset-buying
| happening now that the markets are artificially cheap.
| Companies currently claiming to be "carbon neutral" would
| certainly be unable to afford doing so if it was required of
| every company (similar to if the "cap" was universally zero
| carbon, a clear non-starter today).
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| The main framework the author presents - will it work if everyone
| does it? - sometimes produces reasonable results, sometimes not.
| That's the commons for you!
|
| Imagine someone in the global North building an annual net-zero
| home with solar panels. That will not work if everyone does it.
| There are not enough minerals, not enough land, not enough
| batteries... it won't work for people living in the arctic
| circle, for hunter-gatherer societies, on and on. Doesn't mean
| it's not a good thing to do for the individual guy building the
| house.
|
| In short, the framework proposed by the author is helpful in
| evaluating things, but not dispositive. He has rightly shown that
| offsets cannot work for full decarbonization, but so what. No one
| thing will.
| snewman wrote:
| [Author here] A more careful wording of "will it work if
| everyone does it" would be "if many people do it, does that
| reduce its feasibility for everyone else"?
|
| This addresses the arctic circle and hunter-gatherer examples.
| Obviously there are no one-size-fits-all solutions in life.
| Solar panels won't work above the arctic circle, EVs won't work
| in an area with no roads, hydropower won't work in a desert.
| But if I install a solar panel, that doesn't interfere with
| your ability to also install a solar panel.
|
| "Not enough minerals, not enough land, not enough batteries"
| would be a real problem if true, but my understanding is that
| it is not true. Of course we have a lot of work to do in
| developing mineral sources, scaling up battery production, and
| so forth. But I have not seen a credible source indicating that
| it cannot be done. Do you have any such pointers? (The actual
| trends so far have been very strongly in the opposite
| direction: the more batteries we produce, the cheaper they
| get.)
|
| As for this:
|
| > He has rightly shown that offsets cannot work for full
| decarbonization, but so what. No one thing will.
|
| The limitations of offsets are different than the limitations
| of, say, solar power. It's absolutely true that solar power can
| only be part of the solution, but when you put solar power
| together with wind and storage and (pick your favorites)
| geothermal, nuclear, etc., you can get to a complete solution
| for power generation. In this picture, solar is providing an
| important contribution.
|
| Offsets, conversely, cannot be composed with other tools to
| achieve a complete solution. If a cement plant operator pays to
| preserve a forest, who is going to address the (ongoing!)
| emissions from the cement plant? Not the cement plant operator;
| they already did their part, they purchased an offset.
| tinco wrote:
| There's no maths in your article. I don't get how you can
| write an article about the impact of climate change policy
| without maths.
|
| > Suppose all of the world's cement plant operators agreed to
| offset their emissions this way. Suppose that this succeeds
| so well that 100% of the world's remaining rainforests are
| protected forever. We're still nowhere near net zero!
|
| We're not? How far would we be? Would all the cement
| operators offset equal or exceed the amount of offsets needed
| to protect the entire Amazon? What percentage of carbon
| offsets is the entire Amazon?
|
| Your entire argument hinges on these questions. Ask yourself,
| what happens when all of the Amazon offsets have been sold
| and I still want to emit CO2?
| chrischen wrote:
| "If everyone did it" would just increase the price of offsets to
| the point some people would have to actually curb their own
| carbon emissions no?
| kisamoto wrote:
| Self plug but I built Https://carbonremoved.com to offer carbon
| removal in an easy to use way as an alternative to carbon offsets
| Angostura wrote:
| I prefer the Carbon Fee and Dividend approach
| https://citizensclimatelobby.org/basics-carbon-fee-dividend/
| manholio wrote:
| Offsets make sense if those selling them can prove the emissions
| are physically avoided. For example, if I place a CCS system on
| my cement plant, for each year I use it I have avoided those
| emissions, so I can sell an offset certificate to someone who
| can't do the same, perhaps in some other industry where it's much
| harder to do CCS, say airflight.
|
| This withstands the "what if everybody is doing it?" test,
| because if everybody tries to offset in this manner the demand
| for certificates would push their price to infinity, so everybody
| is forced by the market to stop emitting instead of purchasing
| offsets.
|
| The whole rainforest affair sounds like a complete scam. I
| haven't the faintest idea how rainforest protection, even if it's
| real, can offset carbon emissions by some other party. It sounds
| like an ideological connection, because both are "green" things
| to do, albeit unrelated.
| snewman wrote:
| The problem is that in this scenario, the airline is still
| emitting CO2, so global emissions never go to zero.
|
| If you want to say that the airline is not at fault, because
| they purchased an offset, then the cement plant operator is at
| fault: they never offset their own emissions, they only offset
| the emissions of the airline.
| manholio wrote:
| > the airline is still emitting CO2, so global emissions
| never go to zero.
|
| Sure, but global emissions decrease, and the market will
| allocate effort to the industries where it's cheapest to
| reduce emissions. So you achieve the maximum reduction with
| the minimum cost, as opposed to a prohibitive "net zero"
| goal, which is neither achievable nor a worthwhile target.
| snewman wrote:
| > So you achieve the maximum reduction with the minimum
| cost
|
| Offsets do allow for a certain amount of optimization,
| which is a good thing. However, cap-and-trade, or a carbon
| tax, are better ways of reducing emissions while allowing
| for optimization. And unlike offsets, these other
| approaches can actually take us to net zero.
|
| It's also worth noting that in practice, regardless of the
| policy frameworks we apply, we will not get to net zero
| unless we start climbing the learning curve for every GHG-
| emitting sector of the economy (except for those where the
| best long-term solution is hard offsets via sequestration).
| A flaw in all of the models that allow optimization via
| trading of credits (offsets, cap-and-trade) is that they
| allow us to defer those critical early steps. If all the
| cement plants buy offsets for the next 10 years, then we
| don't start learning how to decarbonize cement.
|
| > a prohibitive "net zero" goal, which is neither
| achievable nor a worthwhile target.
|
| Citation needed.
|
| The mainstream consensus - as embodied in, for example, the
| IPCC reports - is that it is extremely important that we
| get to net zero greenhouse emissions. In fact, many
| scenarios envision that we can+should go to net negative
| emissions for a while, to draw down some of the excess
| carbon in the atmosphere.
|
| And with the ferocious progress in solar, wind, batteries,
| and an exploding plethora of other fields, net zero is
| starting to look very feasible. It's too bad we didn't
| start sooner, but we will get there.
| arbirk wrote:
| But taxing emmissions and lowering other taxes / adding
| incentives has the same effect with much fewer drawbacks.
| manholio wrote:
| They are essentially the same approach, emissions taxes
| require a governmental mandate while offsets work
| voluntarily, where for various reasons political action is
| inefficient, for example in the US.
| ejb999 wrote:
| buying carbon offset always struck me as the same as regularly
| beating your wife and kids, and then absolving your sins by
| donating some money each year to a domestic violence non-profit.
| julienb_sea wrote:
| Let's be honest, offsets are a brand of corporate social
| responsibility, similar to marketing spend. They are ripe for
| abuse and don't do a whole lot in aggregate.
|
| To be fair, when we're talking about an airliner buying offsets,
| realistically what else could they possibly do? We are not flying
| commercial airplanes without emissions during this century. From
| the individual company standpoint, it is a net benefit to
| leverage their profits for emission reductions in other sectors.
| This is similar to Norway's approach of leveraging fuel profits
| to subsidize emission-offset projects, i.e. outcompete the
| emission-burning activities that the market would pay for.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| There are definitely issues with providing companies with a lot
| of fuzzy legislation that allow them to effectively dodge taxes.
| Big companies are good at tax evasion in general. And carbon
| taxes are just yet another tax with a lot of very sketchy and
| rushed through rules and legislation where people have lobbied
| heavily for all sorts of loop holes to be in place.
|
| Carbon offsetting is one of those loopholes. Company X gets to
| burn a lot of coal/gas/whatever but it's OK because they put some
| trees in the ground in a place where that absolutely adds no
| value whatsoever. The trees probably won't be there in ten years.
| The only thing that counts is the hypothetical and typically
| vastly inflated carbon offset that this company gets to dodge
| their taxes with. The higher the better it gets for the tax
| dodging company. Offsetting is just a fancy word for tax dodging.
| Mostly it means spend a little to avoid spending a lot.
|
| But take value added tax for example. It's a pretty normal thing
| around the world and people love avoiding having to pay that. VAT
| used to be easy to dodge with online shopping: just sell/buy your
| goods from a place that doesn't charge any VAT and you are good
| to go. They closed that loop hole years ago and it's a lot harder
| now. Reason, governments did not like missing out on that income
| and they closed a lot of the loop holes. So, now when you buy
| something on Amazon, you pay the appropriate VAT.
|
| Carbon tax is not any different it's a tax and we need to make
| sure it gets paid by the people and companies that owe it.
|
| There are no easy answers here but taxing definitely inspires
| behavior for minimizing cost. And sometimes the smart thing just
| becomes minimizing the carbon intensity because not doing that
| becomes costly/risky once you close all the loopholes.
| rr808 wrote:
| The other problem right now is shipped natural gas. Sure, gas is
| better than carbon if its local. But if you extract gas in Qatar,
| compress it then ship it to Europe, it uses way more carbon than
| Russian gas, so you might as well burn coal.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| This is a great explanation:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCRDseUEEsg
| jgraham wrote:
| So the fundamental premise of the article seems to be "offsetting
| via avoidance can't get you to net zero, so it's a bad idea". I
| agree with the premise (that it can't get you to net zero), but I
| wonder if it can hep with resource allocation and efficient
| sequencing? For example we currently don't seem to have a good
| plan to reduce the carbon emissions of the aviation industry
| other than "fly much less". And whilst I can certainly get on
| board with that, it seems unlikely there's going to be the
| necessary big shift in behaviour (and corresponding shrinkage of
| the aviation sector) over the next five to ten years.
|
| Meanwhile we do know that things like reducing the carbon
| emissions of dwellings by improving insulation is relatively
| straightforward. But individuals often don't have the capital to
| make those changes themselves (even where it would provide cost
| savings in the medium term). So if aviation companies were
| providing money that was redistributed to projects which are
| short-term viable but lacking the necessary funding, that could
| make an impact now, even though it doesn't fully solve the long
| term problem.
|
| Make those contributions mandatory and we have something that
| looks like a carbon tax used to fund decarbonisation programmes.
|
| Of course, in the end you still need to tackle the hard problems.
| But artifical carbon sequestration still seems to be very much at
| the "reasearch project" stage, and whilst creating natural
| environments that can sequester carbon (forests, bogs, etc.) is
| undoubtedly a great idea -- not just for carbon, but also for
| habitat creation, biodiversity, staving of desertification, and a
| host of other reasons -- it seems problematic as a form of
| offsetting for the reasons identified in the article, plus the
| fact that it operates over a period of decades, so it's almost
| impossible to create any accountablity if the carbon is not in
| fact sequestered.
|
| More than that, the fact that increasing tree cover and restoring
| natural habitats is so important means it's worrying when the
| funding plan is based on pennance for carbon emissions. We don't
| want to create a situation where resources for these incredibly
| important projects start to dry up just because more companies
| have successfully reduced their corporate emissions (even if they
| still have product-usage emissions which are usually unaccounted
| for).
| randomsilence wrote:
| >Some offsets may come down in price due to economies of scale,
| but they will never be cheaper than "no offset"
|
| There is one: pricing carbons out of the energy market.
|
| If there is e.g. so much progress in carbon fibers that all
| construction is done with carbon, then all available carbon will
| be used for that and nobody will waste it to create energy.
|
| Cement will cease to be used because there is not enough rough
| sand available. If carbon fibers replace that usage, emissions
| will be stopped.
|
| It's actually stupid to store CO2 in saline storage because in 20
| years or so, we will pay good money to get it back.
|
| It should be possible to calculate the price of carbon in 100
| years when each of the 10 billion global citizens demands their
| share of carbon. Offering investment opportunities now in a
| venture that stores carbon e.g. in the arctics like people store
| aluminum in the Mexican desert, should provide the funds to
| create extraction technologies and facilities to make carbon
| emissions a non-issue.
|
| *edit: Looking at wikipedia, this doesn't make sense. There are
| 54tonnes available per person.
|
| Maybe humanity has to grow to 1000 billion people to question
| carbon emissions.
|
| >Proven sources of natural gas are about 175x1012 cubic metres
| (containing about 105 gigatonnes of carbon), but studies estimate
| another 900x1012 cubic metres of "unconventional" deposits such
| as shale gas, representing about 540 gigatonnes of carbon
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon
| nephanth wrote:
| Offsets should only be negative emissions (like reforestation).
| Then they would be pretty legitimate
| arbirk wrote:
| Cap-and-trade is a colledge Econ professors fever dream. Pure in
| theory but very unhealthy in practice
| RockyMcNuts wrote:
| Cap-and-trade is just carbon tax + corporate welfare (existing
| polluters get to sell their right to pollute) + trading vigs
| for Wall Street
|
| http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2007/08/fundamental-theorem-o...
| web007 wrote:
| I'm a little confused about the cement example. Every inch of
| rainforest is preserved in year 0, so those factories can produce
| their ridiculous amounts of CO2 to compensate for the now-safe
| rainforest. That works IMO since the annual capture of an acre of
| rainforest is equal to one emission-credit worth of factory. (If
| that's not how the math works out then _that_ is a fundamental
| problem that can be solved.)
|
| That's all year 0.
|
| The author forgot about year 1, 2, 3, etc. where those factories
| would still need to offset their production. Where are the
| offsets for those years?
|
| The article also neglects some of the point of paying money for
| offsets, which is paying to research those alternatives that are
| required to get to true net-zero or negative emissions. They are
| VC for science that could solve the problem, funded by those
| causing the problem.
| gumby wrote:
| Carbon credits for non-offset activity (basically GHG removal)
| are a good way to fund development and operation of such systems.
| daveed wrote:
| I've looked into this area. I agree with the author that current
| sources of carbon offsets are poor and sketchy. However, that's
| not to say that people aren't working on more promising methods.
| Direct air capture and growing and sinking seaweed are two things
| that I think definitely pass the additionality aspect.
|
| A big problem, I think, is that the market doesn't really
| differentiate between these, and that there are no strong
| regulatory pressures to buy "good" credits. We don't have a
| carbon tax in the US, and we don't have anything that pressures
| companies to say, if we want to buy offsets, that we only buy
| "good" offsets.
|
| To people who say we need to move off fossil fuels - yes, but how
| do we do it? We can't just move our physical processes from A to
| B process.
|
| It seems to me that imposing economic costs for every extra unit
| of carbon emitted, and only allowing high-quality offsets to
| subtract that, is the best incentive to move forward.
| snewman wrote:
| [author here]
|
| I agree that offsets based on sequestration, as you mention,
| are a completely legitimate tool. I mentioned that briefly in
| the post, but didn't dwell on it as the post was getting too
| long already.
|
| The deep problem with the more common "avoided emissions"
| credits is not that they're low quality (e.g. "protecting" a
| forest that might just burn down) -- though some are indeed low
| quality. The deep problem is that if I pay you to halt your
| emissions, who is going to pay me to halt mine? That's the
| shell game aspect. We start out with two emitters, we halt one,
| we never do anything about the other. One emitter is "done"
| because they're no longer emitting, and the other emitter is
| "done" because they've purchased an offset. The model is broken
| at its core.
| daveed wrote:
| I completely agree with you on avoided emissions. I think
| these should just not be counted. I just hope that going
| forward, people don't lump all carbon offsets into one bucket
| and say "they're all a scam". I feel like we need more
| regulation here.
| Proven wrote:
| autokad wrote:
| carbon offsets are the modern day equivalent to indulgencies.
| random314 wrote:
| How about a carbon tax/offset that directly subsidizes EV and
| solar manufacturing. Certainly worked with Tesla!
| dtdimond wrote:
| markvdb wrote:
| On a related note, I've just started playing around building a
| calculator for another externality of fossil fuels: financing
| Russia's war. First baby step is an API:
|
| https://api.putinhuil.io/redoc
|
| Anyone who feels volunteering some frontend work on that, do
| contact me. You'll find my email in my profile.
| willmadden wrote:
| Our current lack of understanding of the Earth's climate system
| does not allow us to determine reliably the magnitude of climate
| change that will be caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions, let
| alone whether this change will be for better or for worse.
|
| The major errors in the models (we think) are related to not
| accounting fully for the sun's energy, and not modeling clouds
| accurately. There is very high confidence that uncertainties in
| cloud processes explain much of the spread in modeled climate
| sensitivity.
|
| Even the relationship between CO2 concentrations and temperature
| is complicated.
|
| The glacial record shows geological periods with rising CO2 and
| global cooling and periods with low levels of atmospheric CO2 and
| global warming. According to a 2001 article in Climate Research
| by astrophysicist and geoscientist Willie Soon and his
| colleagues, "atmospheric CO2 tends to follow rather than lead
| temperature and biosphere changes."
|
| A large proportion of the warming that occurred in the 20th
| century occurred in the first half of the century, when the
| amount of anthropogenic CO2 in the air was one quarter of the
| total amount there now. The rate of warming then was very similar
| to the rate of warming recently. We can't have it both ways. The
| current warming can't be unambiguously caused by anthropogenic
| CO2 emissions if an earlier period experienced the same type of
| warming without the offending emissions.
|
| Even so, the political narratives and trans-national push for
| net-zero emissions have only strengthened in the face of this
| growing uncertainty.
|
| Why is that?
| the_why_of_y wrote:
| > astrophysicist and geoscientist Willie Soon
|
| _Over the last 14 years Willie Soon, a researcher at the
| Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, received a total
| of $1.25m from Exxon Mobil, Southern Company, the American
| Petroleum Institute (API) and a foundation run by the ultra-
| conservative Koch brothers_
|
| _There were no grants from Nasa, the National Science
| Foundation or the other institutions which were funding his
| colleagues at the Center for Astrophysics. According to the
| documents, his work was funded almost entirely by the fossil
| fuel lobby._
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/21/climate-...
| willmadden wrote:
| Instead of ad hominem attacks you should address his research
| directly. The major climate models are deeply flawed. They've
| admitted as much.
| modmans2nd wrote:
| When did the 90's invent a time machine?
| mikece wrote:
| If we're going to be serious about reducing carbon emissions we
| need to end "cap and trade" and simply apply "cap" to everyone,
| celebrities and politicians included with no exceptions. If we
| cannot commit to that level of reducing carbon I have wonder if
| this isn't a trading scheme masquerading as an environmental
| cause.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| > serious ... celebrities and politicians ...
|
| seems like flamebait
| naoqj wrote:
| What it is is a way of growing the gap between the rich and the
| poor.
| modmans2nd wrote:
| jjulius wrote:
| >Using the poor as a reason not to cap carbon emissions is
| a bit perverse.
|
| And yet the wealthy, historically speaking, seem to have a
| real penchant for taking advantage of the poor in perverse
| ways.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| The problem is theoretical and practical... In theory, a
| cap would be the same for everyone... in practice, rich
| people would be able to avoid the cap, and the poor would
| still be capped.
|
| I lived in a country, where we had odd- even- systems of
| driving a car due to gas shortages many years ago
| (basically if your licence plate ended with an odd
| number, you could drive on odd dates, and even-even).
| Rich people bought another car... poor people had
| transport problems.
|
| We've come to a situation where rich people ride their
| private jets to eco-something conferences, tell Average
| Joes that they shouldn't eat meat and drive their cars,
| because in 20 years, the sea will rise for x meters
| anyway, and then those rich people take their private
| jets back to their newly bought beachfront properties.
|
| So, when the law (which is written by the rich)
| changes... who will get fucked the most? WIll they really
| hurt their own? If they're "afraid" of climate change,
| why don't they change their behaviour first? And if they
| don't, why should average joe do that, when he already
| pollutes A LOT less?
| unmole wrote:
| So, the countries that got rich using cheap and dirty
| energy continue to be rich but the poor shouldn't get the
| chance to get rich? That's rich!
| kaibee wrote:
| It is going to be cheaper for poor countries to go
| directly to renewables. There is no law that says that
| you need to pollute to become wealthy. The pollute-y
| kinda tech was just more cost-effective in the past.
| unmole wrote:
| > It is going to be cheaper for poor countries to go
| directly to renewables.
|
| Coal plants are the cheapest way to produce electricity.
| And no, solar which operates at a fraction of installed
| capacity and is useless for large periods of time is not
| a cheaper alternative.
| Spinnaker_ wrote:
| A third of the world still burns wood for fuel. One of
| the most effective things we can do to curb emissions is
| get them using coal instead. Renewables are not in the
| immediate future for much of the world.
| yywwbbn wrote:
| How is replacing wood with coal going to result in a
| decrease in emissions? That doesn't make any sense..
| wood/biomass is at least sort of renewable.
| Spinnaker_ wrote:
| Burning wood releases more ghg per unit of energy than
| coal. We're not talking about biomass pellets in
| efficient furnaces, but actual wood in a stove. The fact
| that a tree can grow back in 20 years and alter the
| equation doesn't help us at all right now. Leaving the
| trees standing and instead burning coal will result in a
| decrease of emissions.
| rayiner wrote:
| The poor will suffer the most from global warming, but
| they'll still often be much better off than they are now.
| For example, there are estimates that global warming will
| cost Bangladesh 10% of its GDP by the end of the century.
| That's a lot, but it would be far worse to try and avoid
| climate change and risk losing even 1 point of annual GDP
| growth until then.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| There are also estimates that Bangladesh will be under
| the ocean by the end of the century - wonder whether
| that's worth forgoing 1% annual GDP growth.
| briandear wrote:
| They've been estimating some place or another would be
| underwater for years. And it still hasn't happened. What
| did Al Gore say in 2009 about the ice caps in "5-7
| years?" Gore wasn't even close to correct.
| sethrin wrote:
| Mentioning Al Gore in the context of climate change is
| unserious, although I'm sure it's good fodder for
| Facebook memes.
| jjulius wrote:
| >They've been estimating some place or another would be
| underwater for years. And it still hasn't happened.
|
| Because most of those predictions weren't claimed to be
| happening within the next few years. This would still be
| some decades off, at least.
|
| >What did Al Gore say in 2009 about the ice caps in "5-7
| years?" Gore wasn't even close to correct.
|
| [sigh] Here, give me your hand, I'll hold it for you...
|
| >"These figures are fresh," Gore said on Dec. 14, 2009,
| during the COP15 climate change conference in Copenhagen.
|
| >He added: "Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav]
| Maslowski that there is a 75% chance that the entire
| north polar ice cap during some of the summer months
| could be completely ice-free within the next five to
| seven years."
|
| >Gore cited findings from climatologist Dr Wieslav
| Maslowski, a research professor at the Naval Postgraduate
| School.
|
| >However, it appears he mis-stated the forecast,
| according to reporting at the time.
|
| >In an interview with The Times published on Dec. 15,
| 2009, Dr Maslowski said: "It's unclear to me how this
| figure was arrived at. I would never try to estimate
| likelihood at anything as exact as this."
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-climate-change-
| idU...
|
| I would also hope that I don't need to point out to you
| that just because Gore didn't know how to communicate
| data he was seeing, that that means climate change isn't
| a thing. I feel like I do, though, because your comment
| so obviously feels like you're willfully not paying
| attention.
| rayiner wrote:
| Less of Bangladesh will be underwater by the end of the
| century than Holland in the 19th century. My dad was
| complaining yesterday that "Bangladeshi kids today don't
| know what it's like to have to take a boat to school
| during monsoon season." Flood control technology has
| pretty much eliminated such flooding in his village and
| those like it.
| modmans2nd wrote:
| Holland was (and is) a rich country that could afford
| such floor control systems.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Holland in 19th century was poorer than Bangladesh is
| today, but they managed to build dykes and other flooding
| control measures.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| On the contrary, it's quite obvious that the rich emits far
| more than the poor. Even if the rich can accelerate their
| switch to renewable, they still couldn't fly more. They can't
| buy too many cars / houses, etc. Also, any reduction in CO2
| emission from the rich would help the rest of the population
| as the allowed average footprint would increase.
|
| Can you explain your reasoning here?
| naoqj wrote:
| My reasoning is that these taxes increase the price of all
| goods, including food and energy. That hurts the poor much
| more than it hurts the rich because food and energy
| expenses are a much bigger % of their income for the poor.
| kaibee wrote:
| > My reasoning is that these taxes increase the price of
| all goods, including food and energy.
|
| If you do a cash transfer to low-income individuals
| funded by the tax, it is entirely possible to make the
| tax progressive or neutral instead. (and it still does
| all of the important market-pricing action things its
| supposed to)
| michaelt wrote:
| To an extent.
|
| But it can be tricky - some poor people use more gas than
| others. And if we want to give an extra cash transfer to
| the cleaner who starts work before public transit starts
| running, that's going to get complex to administer.
| yywwbbn wrote:
| Giving the same to him as anyone else at a similar income
| level would be just fine. Assuming he can get any other
| job requiring a similar skill level the market wage for
| 'cleaners who have start work before public transport
| starts' running would naturally have to increase.
| moralestapia wrote:
| While I think you have a valid point and I'm 100% behind it,
| cap and trade would not necessarily hurt "the poor".
|
| The difference in emissions between small and big polluters
| (them being people or companies) is abysmal, a low
| contributor could easily double/triple its footprint and
| still come out much lower than the big ones.
|
| I think a sensible solution is cap and trade _at the country
| level_ and let it trickle down from there.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's worse than that.
|
| A system like "cap-and-trade" is sustainable politically
| precisely because it benefits a few carbon traders who can
| make huge profits from the system. They can feed back 0.1% of
| their profits to politicians to keep their privileges.
|
| The rest of us (who depend on this planet to live on) face a
| collective action problem where everybody has to lower carbon
| emissions. For instance the US has high per capita emissions
| but still is responsible for only 15% of global emissions. If
| the US had a breakthrough and stopped emitting carbon
| tomorrow it wouldn't solve the problem unless countries
| responsible for 80% or so of emissions also did.
|
| The structure of it is that there is always (and maybe will
| be) some major country that takes a contemptuous attitude
| about climate change (say the US under Trump) that gives
| other countries (say Germany) cover to talk a good game but
| take no action.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
| simulate-me wrote:
| Cap and trade is a cap for everyone... trading doesn't increase
| the total cap.
| austinbv wrote:
| It's an economic bet - the article assumes static pricing for
| offsets vs mitigation. That's just naive.
|
| As there is less rainforest to buy and the last few squares get
| more and more expensive. Along the way things like solar, bio,
| and other green energy continue to become more economical to
| implement
|
| Eventually there will be a tipping point where it's cheaper to
| move to green than to offset emissions.
| aaron695 wrote:
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Under a proper accounting scheme, "avoided emissions" are
| incentivized by not having to pay the carbon tax on the emissions
| you avoided. You shouldn't get paid for avoiding emissions, you
| should just get the benefit of not having to pay the costs of the
| emissions you avoided.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Carbon offsets are just a reinvention of barter, which is a most
| inefficient way to trade. Cap & trade is yet another barter
| scheme.
|
| Use a scheme that works - money. Tax the carbon content of the
| fuels. It's economically efficient, and it works.
| datadata wrote:
| One thing I'm curious about to see quantified (I'm sure this has
| been done, but don't know where to look): If you burn a gallon of
| gas, it immediately releases some quantity of heat into the
| environment, this becomes heat pollution regardless of how the
| energy is used. The CO2 then joins the atmosphere and contributes
| some marginal change in the balance of energy of the atmosphere
| by inhibiting radiation of energy into space, this can be
| expressed as an amount of power (greenhouse effect power). There
| is some amount of time (greenhouse breakeven time) where these
| effect balance each other out, and the amount of greenhouse
| effect power * time is equal to the initial energy released.
| After that point, the greenhouse impact becomes larger than the
| impact of initial energy released and the greenhouse term
| matters. I did some really rough calculation of this time period
| and got ~ 1 year.
|
| If total CO2 in the atmosphere were at equilibrium (it is not
| currently), there would also be a mean amount of time for CO2 to
| be sequestered. The ratio of (mean CO2 time / greenhouse
| breakeven time) would exactly characterize how much worse for the
| climate energy sources with carbon emissions are relative to zero
| carbon sources in terms of the total contribution of heat into
| the environment. With CO2 not at equilibrium, there is probably
| some fancier model to get a similar characterization.
|
| Finally, it would be interesting to see quantification of
| different sources of renewable power in terms of thermodynamic
| impacts. For example, I would expect that solar would lead to
| energy that would otherwise likely be reflected back to space
| instead be dissipated into heat. It would probably for example be
| worse to have a planet that is entirely covered with black solar
| panels from a radiation perspective. On the other hand, for
| something like hydroelectric or geothermal, it would seem like we
| are simply channeling a energy source that is already just about
| to be dissipated into heat on its own.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| The idea of carbon offsets is comical from even surface
| evaluation. I will pollute as much as I want but I paid my friend
| John not to pollute so all is good. Also I get free money from
| the GOV when I do this.
| giorgioz wrote:
| The article focuses mainly on offset through forest. The word
| forest is mentioned 11 times and the word solar is mentioned 2
| times in the article. Solar panels are a much more tangible form
| of offsets given they produce energy that can be measured. Also
| insulation and temperature can be measured and are much more
| quantitative. The author picks on purpose the hardest offsets to
| measure/quantify in order to support the anti-offset claims.
| kitbrennan wrote:
| Agreed. I work in the sustainability industry, and forestry
| carbon accounts for a small minority of offsets available. It
| also has plenty of well documented flaws so we often steer out
| customers clear of it.
|
| Yet the media and every blog writer loves to talk about offsets
| as though the only projects available are plopping trees in the
| ground.
|
| The vast majority of offsets fall into filling the funding gap
| for renewable energy, methane capture and burning (a fun one to
| explain, but results in a net reduction), biomass use, and on
| and on. The simple fact is offsets are one of the greatest
| funders of decarbonisation in low income nations.
|
| It's also worrying how high this post was voted considering the
| authors apparent lack of understanding for how the carbon
| certification or economics work. Examples seemingly missed out
| include the fact that most certification schemes require
| buffers for forestry carbon to cover the unknowns in this type
| of project, or the economics idea that if every offset was
| purchased it would force offsets to go up in price until they
| encourage carbon reduction.
| Vladimof wrote:
| Carbon offsets are a backward way of reducing pollution... large
| polluters probably lobbied to get the system the way it is...
| sandbx wrote:
| "additionality" is a difficult idea to capture, and can lead to
| perverse incentives to not make good behavior mandatory
| rob_c wrote:
| Like most carbon technologies/statements be it capture, neutral,
| offset, whatever when it comes with an asterix its 99.999% of the
| time not true and usually involves a lot of money and probably PR
| for a multinational, a member of the neauveau riche or a member
| of the upper class with a guilty conscience or bad image/rep
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| This reminded me of a quote from Catch 22:
|
| "His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not
| growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of
| alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the
| more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he
| didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did
| not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not
| growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and
| did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of
| noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be
| done."
| Pr0ject217 wrote:
| Thanks for the laugh. :D
| gsinclair wrote:
| This had me in peals of laughter as a student. It was probably
| the only passage of the book I really enjoyed, being too young
| at the time to understand the rest of it.
| aasasd wrote:
| 'Catch-22' really benefits from a good audio reading, as any
| book with lots of dry humor. Best if the reader can make
| their voice both 'straight-faced' and nearly-over-the-top
| comical at the same time. 'The Good Soldier Svejk' works
| similarly in audio.
| scrumbledober wrote:
| The chapter where they are driving around in a jeep at night
| with the headlights off was one of my favorite book moments
| long before i was mature enough to understand any of that
| book.
| izzygonzalez wrote:
| I read Catch-22 at around 16. I spent hours at the public
| library in a secluded corner desk trying so hard to stifle
| my laughter. Amazing book.
| hinkley wrote:
| I had a very wrong impression about what sort of books
| Vonnegut writes, and I've discovered that I'm very much not
| the only one.
|
| If you haven't read him because the titles and the
| descriptions sound heavy, they really aren't. You're thinking
| Dostoevsky or Nietzsche but he's closer to Mark Twain.
| gnatman wrote:
| Catch-22 was written by Joseph Heller. Similar in ways to
| Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-5 though! And the two were
| friends.
| hinkley wrote:
| D'oh! Unintentional non sequitur.
|
| They do read very similar.
| shrubby wrote:
| Awesome. I did not remember this.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I recommend re-reading every decade or so, more stuff keeps
| turning up that didn't make sense or that you missed the
| previous time.
| jfengel wrote:
| It's a funny passage, but there is a reason governments pay
| farmers not to produce. They want surplus capacity. They prefer
| resiliency to efficiency when it comes to food crops (including
| fodder). If something goes wrong, they want the ability to put
| additional fields into play quickly. You actually do have to
| maintain the machines that you aren't using.
|
| Inefficiencies always look silly, and there will always be
| those looking to take advantage of them. Compare the vast
| amounts of fraud on the recent COVID policies. But they were
| more effective than just letting people die or go bankrupt,
| which would be even more disruptive.
|
| Heller's book is funny and I don't want to ruin what is
| basically a good joke. But it's not as silly as it sounds at
| first.
| cryptonector wrote:
| This is the first time I've ever heard this justification for
| what I always knew as price controls.
| aeternum wrote:
| Yes, it sounds funny when written out but the character in
| Catch 22 is providing some useful utility in having those
| fields ready to grow if needed.
|
| Geopolitics can change quickly, the world's two largest wheat
| producers could go to war with each other. Starvation is bad,
| and unused fields may be a small price to pay to subvert it.
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| giantg2 wrote:
| Is this true? We aren't seeing this even as we are facing a
| potential food crisis due to the war in Ukraine. SCOTUS
| seems to think it's about price control when looking at the
| Roscoe Filburn case.
| [deleted]
| aeternum wrote:
| Price controls have the same effect. By either reducing
| supply or setting a price floor you prop up the market-
| clearing price from the natural price which would be
| lower. This prevents those farms whose profitability
| depends on sale price being somewhere between the natural
| and artificial price from going bankrupt.
|
| Whether the government can actually leverage those unused
| acres when needed however remains to be seen. Government
| would need to act quickly enough to see a potential
| shortage coming, and give farmers the green-light to
| plant. Farmers without unused acres will likely lobby
| hard against this.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| So in the end it still seems like the only realized
| effect is price control.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Open conflict between China and India would indeed be bad
| ;-)
|
| Russia and Ukraine rank 3rd and 7th, respectively, in the
| event that's what you were alluding to. Though as
| _exporters_ their standing is higher.
|
| Based on 2019 FAOSTAT data.
|
| https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QC/
|
| Via Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_
| wheat_production...
| giantg2 wrote:
| "They want surplus capacity. They prefer resiliency to
| efficiency when it comes to food crops (including fodder). If
| something goes wrong, they want the ability to put additional
| fields into play quickly."
|
| Source?
|
| This is not the reason I'm aware of. I believe it's all about
| price control on the supply side, not capacity. Just look at
| that old SCOTUS ruling that forbid individuals from growing
| more more a specific amount a wheat. They used the interstate
| commerce clause to say that the secondary affects of growing
| your own wheat jeopardizes the wheat industry due to the
| inability to control prices.
|
| For example, there are current talks about a food crisis due
| to the war in Ukraine. Yet the USDA has not authorized the
| land enrolled in conservation programs to be utilized. Also,
| that land tends to be the lower producing land. Farmers get
| paid the same for the enrolled land, so they enroll the lower
| producing acres.
| aaron_m04 wrote:
| > I believe it's all about price control on the supply
| side, not capacity.
|
| That doesn't contradict GP's point. Keeping prices from
| dropping too low reduces incentives for farmers to exit the
| business, thereby maintaining high capacity for when it's
| needed.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "thereby maintaining high capacity for when it's needed."
|
| How so? We're talking about acres not farmers. Small
| farms can go under and larger farms will take over
| working the land. We saw that in the 80s. The land being
| conserved is generally lower capacity anyways (they
| aren't going enroll the high producing acres).
|
| So it might not contradict in theory, but the evidence
| from the current situation seems to support that the
| capacity is not valued and only the price control reason
| is. Is there any support for the idea that it's about
| having reserve capacity to utilize? Has it _ever_ been
| utilized?
| kube-system wrote:
| Protection from disruptions by political and/or
| environmental factors are primary goals of agriculture
| policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_policy
| #Objectives...
| giantg2 wrote:
| That's in general. Price controls are an agricultural
| policy too. Do you have something that shows which
| general policies apply to which specific ones?
| kube-system wrote:
| As an example, the Conservation Reserve Program is pretty
| clear about its purpose.
|
| > CRP protects more than 20 millions of acres of American
| topsoil from erosion and is designed to safeguard the
| nation's natural resources
|
| https://www.fsa.usda.gov/Assets/USDA-FSA-
| Public/usdafiles/Fa...
| roenxi wrote:
| In theory I think the capital needed to farm might be the
| real issue; it needs to be maintained even if it is
| unprofitable to do so in a given year.
|
| I'm in two minds. We can't afford for anything to go
| wrong with food security, so it might make sense to do
| something otherwise wildly stupid if it contributes to
| people not starving to death. But I question whether any
| given policy is likely to help or if it is a handout for
| nothing.
|
| But to resolve that specific policies, places & examples
| are needed. Debating theory isn't enough.
| modmans2nd wrote:
| If farmers can't profitably farm they sell the land off
| to other interests or go bankrupt. People are not
| choosing to go into farming....at all. thus a bankrupt
| farm will sit fallow, be bought by some golf course
| development, or be turned into a "nature preserve",
| reducing capacity. The dots are not hard to connect.
| supportlocal4h wrote:
| This is obviously false. If nobody _at all_ had gone into
| farming in the last 40 years, there would be no farmers
| left. Let me introduce you to my neighbors, the farmers.
| Hint: they don 't live in San Francisco. Drive through
| Central Valley and guess how many 20-40 year old farmers
| are involved in all that food production.
|
| There are much fewer farmers than there used to be. But
| simple math tells you that more food consumption divided
| by fewer farmers provides a huge opportunity for more
| profit per farmer. If you are politically- and business-
| savvy enough you can become enormously wealthy.
| giantg2 wrote:
| The dots connect differently than you suggest. Sure,
| maybe in a suburban area the farms turn to golf courses.
| Many small farms are scooped up by larger farms. Looks
| like almost 10% reduction in number of farms since '86
| and the size of the large farms have increased.
|
| https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/big-farms-are-
| getting-b...
| lostlogin wrote:
| Governments do pay farmers not to farm, but having seen this
| in the uk, the land that is set aside was marginal anyway and
| so a subsidy is collected but the production barely changes.
|
| Then there is corn, where so much is produced that uses are
| engineered to try find ways to use it all.
| supportlocal4h wrote:
| Please expound on your claim that you have to maintain
| machines you aren't using. Is there some requirement for how
| many working machines you have to possess to qualify for a
| subsidy?
|
| If so, is that requirement equally as absurd?
| QuikAccount wrote:
| I work in Agtech and this is not exactly true. At least not
| true in terms of big farms. They always work at capacity, in
| fact one of the reasons Covid hit agriculture supply chains
| so hard is that they had no extra capacity.
| modmans2nd wrote:
| Big farms use crazy automated machines that almost (or do)
| drive themselves. Maximizing output allows them to set the
| market price because to generate so much compared to any
| other grower (like OPEC with oil).
| lesgobrandon wrote:
| I love anything that tries to solve the problem by making people
| rich while prolonging the problem. Especially when politics are
| involved. Still have the same problems as 100+ years ago.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Avoided emissions are a scam.
|
| "Nature based" offsets aren't that much better. It is mainly "pay
| us or we'll cut down this forest" but there is a fundamental
| timing problem: you emitted one ton of CO2 yesterday, somebody
| else has to protect a forest forever to keep that CO2 trapped.
|
| There are other schemes that claim to be low cost such as
|
| https://www.vesta.earth/
|
| that have the problem of not being measurable. Contrast that to
| other schemes that get 1% of the press coverage, such as the
| "gold standard" of injecting CO2 into saline aquifers
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17505...
|
| where you really can measure the gas going into the hole and can
| almost (but not quite) take it for granted that the CO2 will stay
| there for 10,000 years.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Watch "Honest Government Ad | Carbon Credits & Offsets" on
| YouTube
|
| https://youtu.be/iCRDseUEEsg
| antattack wrote:
| Carbon offsets do make sense but only after low hanging fruits
| have been picked. In other words, only when we are over 50%
| renewables - carbon offsets would make a difference. The reason
| being is that the next 50% would need extra investment and
| effort.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The only carbon offsets that should be permitted are direct
| air capture of the CO2 you're emitting. This forces all but
| the most difficult to avoid CO2 emissions to alternatives (at
| the current price of $600/ton per Climeworks). Emit, but pay
| the true cost to capture and permanently sequester (on human
| time scale) what you're emitting.
|
| Anything else is the equivalent of indulgences. Forests can
| be clear cut or burned after being paid to not be, etc.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > The only carbon offsets that should be permitted are
| direct air capture of the CO2 you're emitting.
|
| That's not an "offset" - that's just a system that doesn't
| emit CO2. Offsets are when you decline to reduce CO2
| emissions, instead paying someone else to <mumble>.
|
| Offsets were always a scam. As I recall, they were sold to
| us with the promise that carbon "prices" were introductory,
| and were supposed to go up quickly and dramatically. At any
| rate, the whole idea of a "market" in carbon emissions is
| silly, because the price of the underlying asset is set by
| governments.
| varajelle wrote:
| How do you not emit CO2 when producing cement? The only
| way to be carbon neutral is to "offset" it by having some
| carbon capture industry to somehow remove the equivalent
| of CO2 from the atmosphere.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=carbon+netrual+cement
| jvvw wrote:
| From what I have read, one of the issues though is that there
| are only a finite number of trees that can be planted on the
| earth so carbon offsets of that nature are in a sense a one-
| off thing available to humanity - they buy us some time but
| aren't a sustainable solution by themselves.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| >take it for granted that the CO2 will stay there for 10,000
| years.
|
| How do you know this? CCS isn't exactly a secret, it's
| regularly discussed in pop science and mainstream news. It's
| also controversial among actual geologists how well the storage
| part works, if at all.
|
| Capturing CO2 is relatively easy. When someone makes claims
| like it's almost guaranteed that the carbon stays in the ground
| for thousands of years, that's quite the grand claim that would
| require extraordinary evidence. Because knowing geology,
| there's a lot of movement through fluids, tectonics, magmatism
| and all sorts of micro processes altering the chemistry of the
| crust.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| There is no doubt that saline injection on a large scale will
| hold CO2 for a short time. The 10,000 year time span that
| we'd like to hold it for is a long time.
|
| A bit pessimistically, the actual injection into a saline
| aquifer costs something around $20 a ton, but capturing CO2
| from a power plant with an amine stripper is around $80 a
| ton. Direct air capture is a lot more than that.
|
| We aren't seeing many carbon capture projects, even the low
| hanging fruit like
|
| https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/10/f38/mcdonald.
| ..
|
| which is profitable at $20 a ton is not being developed
| because "junk carbon credits" are available at lower prices.
|
| (I know the corn-based Ethanol at the Decatur facility is
| environmentally negative in a lot of ways... But put that
| kind of system on a sugarcane Ethanol plant in Brazil, near
| Sao Paulo and nowhere near the rainforest, and it would be a
| different story.)
| Aachen wrote:
| We do have a bit of experience with geology, though, and it's
| not as black and white as you put it. It staying in the
| ground for x amount of time is likely the median or average
| value within a data set. New volcanos that throw up hidden
| stuff aren't a daily occurrence, but they do occur and we
| have an idea of how often this happens. This whole "but you
| can't know that because we haven't let it run the full ten
| thousand years yet!" sounds a lot like vaccine safety
| reasoning, except it seems to me that we have better insight
| into earth's mechanics on geological timespans than our
| bodies' responses across a lifetime.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| Requiring evidence for claims isn't putting things black
| and white, it's standard practice in science. I notice you
| have not provided any such evidence btw. And that's just
| one of the problems of CCS, we've not even gotten to the
| inherent energy requirement issue that proponents like to
| dismiss by saying energy from renewables can be used which
| is free and doesn't cause emissions. But that isn't true,
| energy has some cost associated with it no matter where we
| source it from.
| Aachen wrote:
| "I'm just asking for evidence" indeed nicely demonstrates
| the asymmetry of time investment. Next, if I dig into the
| research and adequately answer the question, the next
| remark is that the experiment didn't run for the full ten
| thousand years; you don't seem to trust today's knowledge
| anyhow (judging by the comment above). I'm a bit done
| with being the one who opens up Wikipedia or digs in
| hard-to-get-through papers to provide evidence in
| response to people who are _just_ asking questions. You
| can accuse me but you 've not given evidence of anything
| yourself. You're also putting up a false argument,
| claiming that proponents (that includes me) are saying
| it's gonna use magic free energy. I've actually looked
| into that before to figure out if something like
| Climeworks pollutes more than it captures.
|
| Do you have any evidence that the CCS options we have
| today don't work? Either because it uses orders of
| magnitude more energy than claimed or because the carbon
| is released way sooner? (Heck, I'd be fine if it stores
| the carbon long enough to move the problem from 6 years*
| to 600 years so we have time to develop fusion or,
| failing that, fully renewable tech. Anything closer
| towards 6000, let alone 10'000 years, is pure profit.)
|
| * based on https://carbonclock.hugotiger.com/ (but feel
| free to pick 2030 or 2040 or whatever you deem to be
| true)
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| > _Next, if I dig into the research and..._
|
| The conditional implies it's not happened yet I take it.
| Would people just go on the internet and write
| authoritatively about things they don't know and haven't
| even looked up?
|
| It's by the way those who make a claim (or wish to
| support it) that have to provide the evidence, not the
| other way around. It is unlikely you'll find anyone on HN
| inexperienced enough in formal logic to attempt to
| disprove a flying teapot. So you go ahead and provide the
| data and demonstrate how the carbon can't come to the
| surface in thousands of years, which was the original
| claim and which so far remains completely
| unsubstantiated.
| zackees wrote:
| cryptonector wrote:
| > ...but there is a fundamental timing problem: you emitted one
| ton of CO2 yesterday, somebody else has to protect a forest
| forever to keep that CO2 trapped.
|
| That is wildly exaggerated.
|
| First, the planet has greened enormously during the satellite
| era (meaning since 1979 or so).
|
| Second, crustaceans and plankton are incredibly efficient
| little CO2 suckers. Sure, they're not fast enough to get us to
| pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 levels without us reducing CO2
| emissions, but if we stopped altogether I bet they'd get us
| down below 300ppm very quickly. The point is: a) it's not
| "forever" that we'd have to "protect a forest forever to keep
| that CO2 trapped" because the oceans alone will lock away a
| great deal of carbon as calcite, and b) atmospheric CO2 is not
| the emergency it's painted as.
|
| I'm sure it's not welcomed here, but without the Industrial
| Revolution, we were on a path to extinction of photosynthetic
| life on Earth due to starvation. We can quibble over how many
| millions of years, and the process might have slowed down if
| the Ice Age we're in were to end, or it might speed up if it
| were to get colder, so there's lots of unknowns. But at some
| point atmospheric CO2 will run too low.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Delta bought an oil refinery at some point.
|
| Maybe they could buy some nuclear reactors and offset coal and
| ultimately make synthetic fuels.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The US Navy is talking about synthesizing aircraft fuel with
| nuclear power and direct carbon capture on aircraft carriers.
|
| An aircraft carrier has to slow down to take on fuel which
| reduces combat effectiveness (at full speed it can go a few
| miles while a ballistic missile in flight so it is hard to
| hit) they are probably paying upwards of $10/gal for fuel as
| it is. If synthetic fuel means they can operate independently
| of supplies for longer that's significant.
|
| The Army wants to synthesize fuels too because they are
| paying more like $50/gal to deliver fuel to forts in places
| like Afghanistan. They are considering crazy ideas like
| molten salt reactors, O'Neill style space solar power, etc.
| It's a matter though of trading a vulnerable and expensive
| supply chain (Ukraine didn't bother trying to stop the tanks
| charging towards Kyiv because the fuel trucks supplying them
| were a soft target) for some expensive (maybe dangerous)
| hardware that the enemy can blow up.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Makes a lot of sense.
|
| Some of the aviation could be changed quite a lot if fuel
| savings was more weighed. For example tankers and
| transports could be turboprop, maybe use more smaller
| higher L/D drones instead of F-18:s if not absolute needed
| etc...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I used to really like these
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Canada_Dash_8
|
| but airlines that serve my airport have switched to
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_CRJ100/200
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_ERJ_family
|
| which are less fuel efficient but easier to maintain, an
| important consideration if you are flying in and out of
| small airports half the time.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| And they fly faster so one plane can make more trips per
| month. It shows how cheap fuel is...
| Tossrock wrote:
| Some tankers and transports already are turboprops, eg
| the C-130 family.
| DennisP wrote:
| Vesta does have the advantage of being extremely cheap,
| assuming it works and their cost estimates are correct. It
| seems like it could be approximately measurable with some
| periodic random sampling.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I have a question. If it's injected into water, won't that
| create carbonic acid? Carbonic acid is what dissolved much of
| the limestone into caverns around here. Is there a potential
| for sinkholes or contamination of fresh water aquifers as the
| acid dissolves the containing rocks?
| johnfernow wrote:
| Are there any organizations that one can donate to that use
| those more effective methods? There are tons of different
| organizations for carbon offsets, but I haven't seen any that
| inject CO2 into saline aquifers if you donate to them, for
| example. Most use avoided emissions or are "nature based", and
| as you have pointed out, both can be problematic. So I'm
| curious if anyone has any organizations that they can
| recommend.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I'm shocked at the uniform cynicism here. The big banks are
| just now getting involved--and hate as you like, but they will
| bring way more accountability to a multibillion dollar market.
| When top, public facing companies like Jet blue or Microsoft
| buy carbon offsets, they don't want to get scammed. They expect
| meaningful carbon reductions and accountability systems will
| improve the market efficiency over time. For instance,
| adjusting the credit amount based on probability and risk. No
| one wants to invest in something fraudulent!
|
| We need an all-of-the-above approach to climate change and if
| carbon credits make a meaningful reduction in rainforest
| destruction, increase environmentally diverse farm fallowing,
| subsidize mangrove planting or more efficient
| technologies/practices, it could have a HUGE impact. Maybe give
| it a little time before adopting such dismissive cynicism
| towards markets and technology, please?
|
| Am I completely out on a limb here?
| pzduniak wrote:
| >When top, public facing companies like Jet blue or Microsoft
| buy carbon offsets, they don't want to get scammed.
|
| Don't they benefit from the status quo? It's not the
| companies that get scammed, it's the people who select the
| cheap "offset my carbon footprint" option when getting a
| plane ticket and pay for JetBlue to transfer that money to
| some scammy offsetting service. JetBlue gets good PR for
| contributing to "carbon offsetting programs" on behalf of
| customers - which are cheap enough because the market is not
| heavily regulated.
|
| I don't trust international corporations to do anything but
| optimize to make more money.
| sdeframond wrote:
| > When top, public facing companies like Jet blue or
| Microsoft buy carbon offsets, they don't want to get scammed
|
| Yes, except what they are really buying is regulatory
| compliance, not meaningful reduction.
|
| I do agree with your general sentiment though.
| Clent wrote:
| Is it cynicism to notice that capitalist system that created
| the problem is trying to solve the problem it created with
| more capitalism or is it magically thinking to believe this
| is the moment where self imposed regulations will come
| together to solve the problem?
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Doesn't technology often create problems that technology
| solves? Don't people create problems that people solve? Can
| you explain the logic of your argument?
| uoaei wrote:
| It seems incredibly lazy to flatten all the various forms
| and scales of disasters into a single layer of
| "problems".
|
| Climate change is incomparable to many of the so-called
| "problems" you may point to.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Why is climate change incomparable? I would compare it to
| the technology that was developed in response to CFCs and
| the ozone hole. Don't call me lazy as an insult, please.
| snewman wrote:
| [Author of the original post here]
|
| I agree that some carbon offsets / credits are "high
| quality", i.e. represent actual, durable reductions in
| someone's emissions. They can help with the important
| projects you mention.
|
| When the result is to durably sequester carbon from the
| atmosphere, I also agree that this is a good contribution
| toward net zero. I don't know anything about mangrove
| planting, but that sounds like it might fit. Certainly the
| Climeworks project someone mentioned elsewhere in this
| discussion fits.
|
| The problem is with "avoided emissions" offsets. Suppose X
| and Y are both emitting greenhouse gases, and X pays Y to
| stop. That's a half solution, but it is often treated as a
| complete solution: X looks good because they bought an
| offset, and Y looks good because they're no longer emitting
| anything. That's the shell game.
|
| Concretely, let's consider rainforest preservation. This is
| critically important, and plausibly (I don't actually know a
| lot about it) requires payments to relevant actors in places
| like Brazil. So yes, as a society, we need to come up with
| money for those payments. But we need to come up with that
| money in a way that doesn't let some _other_ polluter
| permanently off the hook for _their_ emissions. If an airline
| pays to protect some rainforest, says "hey look an offset",
| and declares victory, how will we ever address the airline's
| emissions? We've done some good in the short run (we
| accelerated the effort to preserve the rainforest), but then
| we arrive at a dead end.
|
| Cap-and-trade systems avoid this problem, if all of the
| buyers and sellers of credits are part of the system, and the
| cap is gradually reduced to zero. But if a company says "my
| plan to reach net zero relies heavily on purchasing offsets",
| outside of a cap-and-trade system that eventually squeezes
| avoided-emissions offsets to zero, then we're back to the
| shell game.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I don't think anyone thinks that offsets are the complete
| solution. Eventually we will have low carbon flight tech. A
| lot of money is being invested in developing this but it
| takes time to transition. Your argument seems to be based
| on the idea that because it doesn't totally solve the
| problem then it is a scam. But if it contributes to the
| solution and buys time then what is the problem? It is all
| about buying time. Tech is rapidly advancing.
|
| For instance, I was just in Dubai. Wow, that is an
| unsustainable city. Except that they are plowing wealth
| into solar. It is 13% solar powered today (plenty of sun in
| those parts) and will be 100% by 2050. That's great. But
| the world needs time to transition. And if we can buy time
| by creating revenue streams for saving rainforest lands and
| mangrove forests and the like, that's a win win. But it
| still isn't enough without the tech.
|
| And yes, sure, it would be great if no one drove cars or
| flew. But short of economic collapse, we need time to
| transition. What am i missing?
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Is there a moral question here about whether some things,
| like responsibility, are intrinsically "non-transferable"?
|
| When thinking of simple goods or services it seems fine
| that I can buy a car and then sell it. That's part of
| property rights.
|
| For other things like a medical prescription, driving
| license or degree certificate it seems correct that these
| things are somehow tied to an individual.
|
| Capitalism has evolved to allow transfer of many non-
| tangibles. Financialisation is really the ability to trade
| companies, and more importantly "titles and rights".
| Eventually this has extended to buying and selling debts.
| Through this mechanism we've accepted, in the limit, the
| trading of _responsibility_.
|
| Yet there are already obvious limits to this. If I murder a
| man I cannot sell that burden by contract, such that if I'm
| convicted another will go to prison in my stead.[1]
|
| These carbon trades feel a little bit more like this last
| case than selling a car. Should one get to commit a
| tangible harm and then offload the responsibility? [2]
|
| [1] actually I think this may have been historically
| possible in some cultures.
|
| [2] This is a Kantian question - because clearly under
| Utilitarian analysis I can simply claim a "greater good is
| served".
| snewman wrote:
| It's an interesting question but I don't think it applies
| here.
|
| The problem with carbon offsets is not some moral
| question about my offloading my guilt to another party.
| The problem is that there's double-counting. Going back
| to the scenario, "suppose X and Y are both emitting
| greenhouse gases, and X pays Y to stop". Let's break that
| down:
|
| 1. Initially, X is emitting greenhouse gases. I'm not
| sure moral terminology is helpful here, but for the sake
| of discussion, we can say X is "guilty".
|
| 2. Initially, Y is also emitting greenhouse gases, they
| are also "guilty".
|
| 3. X makes a payment to Y, and Y halts their emissions.
|
| If we say that Y is no longer guilty, because they
| stopped emitting, then we must say that X is still
| guilty.
|
| If we say that X is no longer guilty, because they
| purchased an offset from Y, then we must say that Y is
| still guilty: they started out guilty, and they sold off
| the rights to their compensating action (halting
| emissions) to X.
|
| We started with two guilty parties, and only one
| compensating / atoning action was performed. There is no
| coherent framework in which it can be said that both
| parties are now innocent.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| This is the stronger argument. It's more complete. Thank
| you for explaining. I think we don't disagree and that
| you recognise my "non-transferability of guilt" in your
| step 4. Anyway the double accounting makes a clearer
| case.
|
| edit: some clarity
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| But carbon emissions still go down, paid for by one
| party. What's the issue?
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > But carbon emissions still go down, paid for by one
| party. What's the issue?
|
| Unfairness/inequity. That's why I said my question was
| not a Utilitarian one. I do not speak for the PP.
|
| edit: removed possible smartass condescension
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I read your post again but I don't see what is not fair.
| If you look at the target sites for carbon credits, many
| are reforestation projects in the developing world. Is
| the concern that it is reducing industrial capacity
| there? Or, if it is paying another company to subsidize
| efficiency, is the concern that the money is staying
| among the rich? Or is it a "they have sinned and you
| can't pay off sin?" Im assuming not.
|
| I see this as "I made a mess in the street and I hired
| cleaners to clean it up." Sure, I didn't do the cleaning
| myself, but I'm still being responsible for it, right?
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > Or is it a "they have sinned and you can't pay off
| sin?"
|
| Interesting. Yes, this is the closest of your choices.
| Not quite Biblical Sin :), but that will do for the
| moment.
|
| Please note that I asked a genuine, good-faith _moral
| question_. I 'm not making an assertion here.
|
| I removed a remark that "perceived fairness is often more
| important in human-centred affairs than summative
| outcomes" - but then noticed that you teach human centred
| design and obviously get that. So let's explore it
| together.
|
| > many are reforestation projects in the developing
| world.
|
| Regardless of how "good" the purchased offset is, it does
| not impact the Kantian moral argument - in particular I
| am thinking about universalisabilty. I don't think it
| matters whether one bribes the rich or poor in this case.
| the question is about the ethics of transferable
| responsibility - for which I used the obviously extreme
| edge case of buying immunity from murder charges.
|
| > I see this as "I made a mess in the street and I hired
| cleaners to clean it up." Sure, I didn't do the cleaning
| myself, but I'm still being responsible for it, right?
|
| No, I think that's where I would differ. Let's say you
| made the mess the next day, and the next, and the one
| after... and each day you pay someone to clean it up.
| You're not off the hook. Somewhat like the broken window
| fallacy, you're still creating a net loss to society.
| Unless you think those cleaners have nothing better to do
| with their lives than labour cleaning up your mess.
|
| Let's consider another slightly more ordinary place this
| logic operates and fails. Parking or speeding fines. Why
| do we have motoring restrictions? Ultimately it's to
| reduce loss of life. Careless driving or parking gets
| people killed. But paltry fines have no effect on those
| who simply see it as an extra charge to be factored into
| being an anti-social driver. Now suppose that instead I
| can simply pay another driver to stay at home so I can
| speed around by the local school and park across the
| hospital entrance.
|
| Being "responsible for it" would be _not making the mess
| in the first place_. You 're "making amends for it" -
| those would be better words. But if that delivers no
| deterrence from doing it again, a fundamental aspect of
| justice necessary for regulating human affairs is not
| served.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The core problem with carbon offsetting is that it allows the
| rich elites to continue polluting the environment (because in
| their mind, they paid for it) while the poor have to take the
| brunt of the load instead. The richest 10% of the world
| account for _half_ the CO2 emissions [1], a figure that will
| only grow larger.
|
| What the world needs are clear and hard _bans_ : no more
| import of meat from Brazil until the country _provably_
| prevents further razing of the Amazonas rain forest, a hard
| cap on flights per person and year to two or four (with
| reasonable allowance for people in multi-national
| relationships, expats and the likes), a ban on twenty
| different brands of yogurt (or any other product class) in
| stores, and most importantly a hard cap on vehicle size and
| gas consumption: no fat SUV /truck until you prove to the
| government you have a reasonable need for such a vehicle.
| Everyone else gets a standard electric vehicle that serves
| their needs (i.e. singles and no-child households get either
| a single 2-seater standard car or two Smart-sized cars, and
| families get a 3+number_of_children sized car).
|
| Yes, part of this sounds like "omg communism!!!" but the
| sooner people realize that the status quo is not sustainable
| and never has been, the better.
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/04/carbo
| n-f...
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Viva la revolution! But, I think the "let's just dictate"
| approach is likely to fail for many, many reasons.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| If humanity continues its current path of not caring or
| actively worsening the problem (such as Brazil is doing),
| more likely than not nature will dictate and send us into
| extinction - which is why the German Constitutional Court
| required our previous government to produce
| scientifically sound plans for CO2 reductions in a
| landmark ruling [1]. The reasoning was that if nothing or
| not enough is being done today, the freedom of future
| generations is automatically restricted, to the point
| that there may be no choices left.
|
| [1] https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pr
| essemit...
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I'm not unaware of the problem but there are other
| solutions besides "let's have a dictatorship."
| uoaei wrote:
| What precedent exists to make you think that big finance will
| "bring accountability" to anything that they themselves are
| completely unaccountable for?
|
| It is trivial to identify many examples where they are neck-
| deep in investments that run counter to the stated goals of
| environmental movements. Oil investments are a very simple
| example, but so is the continued financial support for
| companies which dump toxic waste into public lands. If there
| is no accountability now, how the hell will there be more
| accountability when they get even more fingers in more pies?
|
| Investment relies on a simple idea: that the investment
| returns more money than you put in. Which part of what you've
| described makes that expectation compatible with solutions to
| the climate crisis?
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| It is pretty simple: now there can be investment in
| companies that make money from reducing carbon. If the
| products don't actually reduce carbon, their customers flee
| them and the investment fails. Does that make sense?
| uoaei wrote:
| It makes sense in absence of any acknowledgment of our
| global economy's structure, sure.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I don't follow. The structure of making investments?
| Capitalism?
| [deleted]
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Let me go out on a limb. Carbon trading of some kind has been
| a popular policy since the 1980s. In fact it's almost
| completely substituted for any real action.
|
| If there really was going to be some justice for people's
| crimes in this life in the next I'd suggest that William
| Nordhaus might, looking back 1000 years from now, be seen as
| the most evil person in history.
|
| https://theconversation.com/nobel-prize-winning-economics-
| of...
|
| You might assign 100 million or so deaths to the communist
| and fascist movements, but a real climate crisis could kill
| 10x or 50x that.
|
| Nordhaus brought climate change into the space of
| neoliberalism and promoted the idea that trading carbon
| credits could fix it.
|
| If we go down this road in 30 years people are going to be
| saying "we need an all-of-the-above approach... it could have
| a HUGE impact ... give it a little time."
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Are disputing the efficacy of carbon trading? This article
| isn't. Cap and trade is different from offsets.
|
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1918128117
| Retric wrote:
| Such estimates always depend on what you consider the
| baseline. Is a world without the industrial revolution the
| baseline for a world without climate change? If so you can
| arguably reach a negative death total from climate change
| or multiple billions by excluding all positive effects.
|
| Which is why people never really take such estimates
| seriously, it's far too arbitrarily a number to really mean
| much.
| axus wrote:
| The big banks did not bring accountability to the coronavirus
| relief loans, because there was no penalty to them for
| failing.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| People pushing carbon offsets seem to have a lack of
| understanding of how global element cycles work. To be brief, the
| only way to 'offset' fossil fuel CO2 emissions is to bury an
| equivalent amount of carbon, extracted from the atmosphere, in a
| geologically stable formation or a permanently anoxic aquatic
| basin. End of story. Planting trees does not 'offset' fossil
| emissions unless you plan to take the tree and bury it in an
| anoxic environment in which it can never decay. Solar panels and
| wind turbines offset nothing at all.
|
| The only real fix for fossil-fueled global warming is to
| eliminate fossil fuels from the energy mix. A practical plan for
| doing that would result in perhaps a 3% reduction in fossil fuel
| PRODUCTION per year (no, don't try counting emissions, count
| production). In 30 years, this would mean zero fossil fuel
| production globally.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| > the only way to 'offset' fossil fuel CO2 emissions is to bury
| an equivalent amount of carbon, extracted from the atmosphere,
| in a geologically stable formation or a permanently anoxic
| aquatic basin
|
| Why would avoiding the same amount of emissions in a place
| where it's cheaper to avoid not help?
|
| Let's say for each kg of kerosene you burn in your plane, you
| hand out a solar lamp to someone using kerosene lamps,
| accelerating solar lamp adoption in a way that causes 1 kg less
| kerosene to be burned by that person.
|
| The total emissions without the flight + compensation is 1 kg
| of kerosene burned in a lamp (over the period we're looking
| at). The total emissions with the flight + compensation is 1 kg
| of kerosene burned in a plane (and 0 in the lamp).
|
| That seems very much offsetting.
| em500 wrote:
| But in reality, when prices at the pump rise >20%, even so
| called progressive governments resort to excise tax cuts and
| drill baby drill. Because if they didn't they'll be out of
| office very quickly.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > People pushing carbon offsets seem to have a lack of
| understanding of how global element cycles work.
|
| They're the same as people pushing for mass adoption of EVs,
| they're not looking for a long term solution to the
| environmental problem, they're looking for a short term
| solution to extend their market for one more generation.
| jhgb wrote:
| But mass adoption of EVs, percentage wise, is absolutely
| required. I don't see how the alternative of keeping ICE
| vehicles is sustainable.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| I've been wondering if hybrids aren't actually better than
| full EVs, since I assume that 95% of trips are short enough
| to be covered by a hybrid's electric capacity while also
| minimizing the battery waste by not having gigantic
| batteries.
| jhgb wrote:
| It would make sense to have a range extender as an
| option. But real-world statistics about PHEV usage
| patterns have been discouraging.
| (https://www.electrive.com/2020/09/28/phev-real-world-
| consump...)
| lm28469 wrote:
| Neither thermic nor electric vehicles are sustainable with
| our current usage.
|
| Let's pretend you don't know about cars and someone comes
| to pitch you this idea: "We'll make a 3 tonnes metal box,
| with a 1 tonne battery, that will on average only transport
| about 80kg of human being from A to B, we'll need about 1B
| of them". Who on earth would believe this is the optimal
| solution to a green future ?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| You do realize that people aren't _trying_ to make heavy
| vehicles, but that weight is imposed by physical and
| economic constraints. EV manufacturers try very hard to
| _minimize_ weight. But anyway, it makes no sense to
| criticize EVs in a vacuum--tell us all about your miracle
| solution! Are we going to treat every urban community
| like a dense metropolis? Or are we going to close down
| urban communities and force everyone into fewer concrete
| jungles? And how much do you reckon your solution will
| cost?
| fluctor wrote:
| Some of the size forcing is for "safety," that is, we
| have larger vehicles because they need to survive crash
| tests at high speeds. But if you have a city that decides
| they want to set all speed limits at 20 mph and design
| streets so that it's physically very difficult to exceed
| that speed, you can get away with much smaller vehicles
| (no vehicles over a certain weight allowed within city
| limits, for example).
|
| Not every place needs to be a "dense metropolis," but
| designing everyone's lives and modes of transportation
| around the needs to people who live 20 or more miles from
| the nearest city doesn't make a ton of sense. Too often
| this discussion is presented as either/or when it can be
| both/and.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Some of the size forcing is for "safety," that is, we
| have larger vehicles because they need to survive crash
| tests at high speeds. But if you have a city that decides
| they want to set all speed limits at 20 mph and design
| streets so that it's physically very difficult to exceed
| that speed, you can get away with much smaller vehicles
| (no vehicles over a certain weight allowed within city
| limits, for example).
|
| But people need their vehicles to drive on highways as
| well as side streets (where 20mph is more reasonable).
| There's a reason EVs began with smaller, low-capacity
| batteries that were suitable for the kind of driving
| you're describing, but grew larger because people want to
| be able to travel between cities effectively.
|
| > Not every place needs to be a "dense metropolis," but
| designing everyone's lives and modes of transportation
| around the needs to people who live 20 or more miles from
| the nearest city doesn't make a ton of sense. Too often
| this discussion is presented as either/or when it can be
| both/and.
|
| I agree that we shouldn't try to treat urban areas like
| rural areas or vice versa. That said, I don't think we're
| optimizing for rural areas (I've lived in both kinds of
| environments). Specifically, I think cities can do more
| to optimize for their own conditions both without
| imposing on people in suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas
| and without necessitating the creation of "side-street-
| only" cars. Specifically, I think this looks like "better
| planning"--invest in more, faster, and higher-throughput
| highways so people can get around quickly without relying
| on side-streets. Side-streets should be slow and
| pedestrian-friendly, highways should be fast and car-
| friendly. Get cars off side-streets and onto highways.
| Note that this is eminently compatible with more
| investment in public transit and cycling infrastructure
| (fewer cars on the streets = more room for bus and bike
| lanes). I reject the premise--we aren't "designing
| everyone's lives around the needs of people who live 20+
| miles from the nearest city". People who live in cities
| can (and do!) buy fewer, smaller cars than people who
| live in rural areas. I think you're right that cities can
| do more to optimize for their own needs, but I think this
| looks more like "planning" than building cars that are
| only safe/useful on side streets. With respect to
| planning, I think cities can do a lot more to make fast,
| high-throughput highways so people aren't using city
| streets for commuting and thus city streets can be slower
| and more pedestrian friendly. This is also compatible
| with investing more in public transit and cycling.
| jhgb wrote:
| Ban people from manual driving on public roads and even
| highways could work with lighter vehicles with less
| passive safety. Of course that might be more of an long-
| term outlook, as in "late this century", but it seems
| like an option.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Moving intercity traffic to mass transit be it trains or
| busses seem entirely reasonable. Ofc, this means that
| those services should be better or as good as private
| options.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| There's a ton cities can do to make public transit a lot
| more comfortable without billions for building out new
| public transit infrastructure (which isn't to say that
| the latter is a bad idea!). Like, put some police on
| trains and buses so people are less likely to stab,
| urinate, smoke, blast music, etc. Clean buses and train
| cars regularly. Keep a high standard for antisocial
| behavior (if someone is being disruptive, kick them off).
| Run more trains and buses on existing infrastructure
| (don't make people wait half an hour for a train, keep
| people from being packed so tightly into train cars and
| buses). Keep reliability high.
|
| If we can't manage these fundamentals, I don't know how
| much of an improvement we would see by building out new
| infrastructure.
| jhgb wrote:
| I'm not sure where you got that we need 1B of such
| vehicles. We won't. But of all the vehicles that will
| remain, I'm willing to bet that almost all will be EVs.
| Even if there will be a fraction of vehicles on the roads
| compared to today, they _still_ won 't be using ICEs.
| Hence, mass adoption of EVs is inevitable either way.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I don't think anyone is pushing mass adoption of EVs as the
| whole solution to the climate problem, but it largely solves
| for the "consumer transit" share of the climate problem. Of
| course, if you're hinting at doing away with cars, then yeah,
| people are fixating on EVs because getting rid of cars is
| completely infeasible, politically, economically, and
| environmentally (it would be a decades-long project that
| would involve tremendous emissions to address a small part of
| a problem that we have only a few decades to solve in total).
| lm28469 wrote:
| > it would be a decades-long project
|
| Too bad nobody makes decade long projects for their
| country/continent/planet anymore. Instead we're stuck in ~5
| years cycles of throwing shit against the wall and seeing
| what sticks
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| You misunderstand the problem. It's not an issue that the
| project is decades long, it's that it is going to take,
| say 50 years of capital- and carbon-intensive development
| to solve a small part of a larger problem that we only
| have, say, 50 years to solve. And it offers virtually
| nothing over EVs except to gratify some anti-car
| ideologues.
|
| NOTE: if it's not evident, those 50 year figures are made
| up. The point is that we have limited time and resources
| to solve the whole climate problem and we should be
| efficient (rather than ideological) in our approach.
| unholiness wrote:
| Sorry, what? The long-term benefits of EVs is that they can
| be powered by clean, renewable and nuclear energy (though
| even without that they are more energy-efficient than ICE
| cars)
|
| Are you proposing that replacing ICE vehicles with EVs is not
| an essential part of a long-term, low-carbon future?
| sokoloff wrote:
| > long-term benefits of EVs
|
| If a benefit of EVs is currently theoretical and would only
| come after the useful life of the car, is it really a
| benefit?
|
| I say this as a happy EV-owner, but one who doubts that my
| EV will still be on the road by the time when my
| electricity is >75% sourced from renewable or nuclear
| energy.
| comex wrote:
| If nothing else, at least the demand from your EV is
| contributing to the mammoth project of EV charging
| infrastructure, which will help with future EV uptake.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| The current projections are that the switchover to
| primary renewables _is_ going to happen in the lifetime
| of EVs manufactured today. For a slow to adapt industry
| such as our energy grids the drastic capital cost
| reductions (much less TCO advantages such as decreased
| fuel costs, decreased maintenance costs) of renewables
| (especially wind and solar, but some of those advances
| have had knock-on effects in mainstay hydro 's TCO too)
| has made them take notice and they are adjusting much
| more rapidly than people assume. Entire countries have
| had 24 hour periods or more entirely running on
| renewables, and sure that's good weather, but that's
| still not something some people would have guessed ten
| years ago. Most of that isn't top-down government
| mandates, most of that is "ordinary" capitalism and the
| fact that power companies are realizing it's "easy money"
| to go for cheaper renewables as large portions of their
| energy mix. (To be fair, power companies have always
| worked that way. Even what most people think of as "coal
| states" have always been nearly as much hydro as coal
| since basically the beginning of electricity.)
|
| Just about no one is building new nuclear into the mix
| right now, but that's a different can of worms, and at
| least for the moment with so many easy wins in sight to
| be had in solar/wind/improving existing hydro it may not
| even be necessary to add much or any nuclear.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > lifetime of EVs manufactured today
|
| My EV is 7.5 years old and so probably halfway to its
| median practical service life. It's already down to
| around 70 miles of "can count on it" range and in 7.5
| more years, I expect it to be down to just under 60.
|
| I don't think very many 2015 Nissan LEAFs will be in
| service at the epoch rollover, unless someone comes out
| with a <$2500 in today's money battery replacement pack.
| No one's putting a $5-7K battery into a 15 year-old
| outdated tech BEV in 2030.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| For some clarification, I did mean more in terms of EVs
| manufactured _starting around_ today (next 10-15 years)
| more than those manufactured _as of_ today.
| babypuncher wrote:
| The problem with pushing EVs as the ultimate solution to
| car emissions is that they are still grossly inefficient
| compared to other modes of transportation (rail, bus,
| etc.). EV's do nothing to solve other problems that car
| culture has created, such as urban sprawl and the
| associated traffic.
|
| We should be pushing to replace ICE vehicles with EV's, but
| we should also be pushing to make mass transit more viable,
| and make our communities more pedestrian/bicycle friendly.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Or in general with smaller cheaper, lighter vehicles. We
| should aim to build society where we don't need private
| vehicles for intercity transport. And then intracity we
| have electric bicycles or very small vehicles outside
| specific use cases.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _We should be pushing to replace ICE vehicles with EV
| 's, but we should also be pushing to make mass transit
| more viable, and make our communities more
| pedestrian/bicycle friendly_
|
| Sure. That doesn't make EVs a "short term solution". This
| is in the same category of fallacy that lead hippie-era
| greens to oppose nuclear power. It's not nukes or
| windmills, it's nukes or coal.
| ncmncm wrote:
| No. It _really is_ nukes or wind turbines.
|
| Nobody is building coal plants. They are being shuttered
| just as fast as renewables can be brought online.
| Starting nukes steals funding from that for construction
| projects which will deliver no power for a decade. We
| burn coal in the meantime. The coal steals even more
| dollars, the whole time, and the nuke displaces much less
| coal when it does come online, if ever. Often, it
| wouldn't.
|
| Money is fungible. Dollars spent on a nuke, and on coal
| the whole time it is being built, is dollars _not_ spent
| on wind turbines that displace coal immediately as each
| comes online, and displace more than the nuke could.
|
| This is a very stark difference, and no amount of logic-
| chopping can change it.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The essential part of a long-term, low carbon future is to
| drastically reduce car use. After that wether it's an EV or
| an ethanol fueled ICE is really secondary.
| cassandratt wrote:
| This isn't very well thought out, where do you live?
| lm28469 wrote:
| We spread too much thanks to unsustainable
| technologies/ideologies and now that we're facing the
| consequences our excuse is "how will we continue living
| unsustainably"
|
| Same answer as people who built cities in the middle of
| fucking deserts and complain about potential lack of
| water: you don't
| cowmoo728 wrote:
| From many people's viewpoints, it is not very well
| thought out to subsidize the use of 3-ton single
| occupancy vehicles that require massive amounts of energy
| to manufacture and massive amounts of energy to move. At
| the very least there should be far higher licensing
| taxes, congestion charges, road wear taxes, enormous gas
| taxes, etc.
| generalenvelope wrote:
| I think people don't realize just how bad car dependence
| is for their own communities. notjustbikes has many good
| videos on the topic, such as:
|
| Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
|
| Why American Cities Are Broke - The Growth Ponzi Scheme:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0
|
| The Ugly, Dangerous, and Inefficient Stroads found all
| over the US & Canada:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM
| throwawayboise wrote:
| It would be far better to generate synthetic gasoline from
| atmospheric carbon, if such a thing were possible. Then you
| don't need to replace all the cars or all the fuel (energy)
| delivery infrastructure.
| dbingham wrote:
| EVs still have a ton of embodied carbon in their
| production. Creating those batteries is not easy, we still
| haven't figured out how to remove carbon emission from the
| steel production process, and at the end of the day we
| can't beat climate change with out reducing our overall
| resource consumption substantially.
|
| I looked up the numbers and did the math a few years ago,
| and best case scenario - an EV fueled entirely by non-
| emitting sources - is that an EV cuts emissions by 85% in a
| full lifecycle analysis.
|
| And that's actually a pretty rare case. Most people getting
| EVs right now are charging them on grids that are still
| mostly powered by fossil fuels. Which complicates matters
| even further. Where I live, if I were to use an EV charged
| on the grid, I would actually be _increasing_ my emissions
| over a reasonably fuel efficient gas powered ICE.
|
| For most people, car use doesn't have to be necessary. With
| intelligent design of our cities and a shift in culture,
| most people could get around primarily by foot, on bike, or
| by mass transit and forgo car ownership. So drastically
| reducing car ownership needs to be the bigger part of the
| equation. Those who absolutely still need to own a car can
| go EV. But we can't hit our carbon targets by simply
| replacing all the ICE vehicles with EVs.
| glogla wrote:
| > Where I live, if I were to use an EV charged on the
| grid, I would actually be _increasing_ my emissions over
| a reasonably fuel efficient gas powered ICE.
|
| Given how efficient even something like a coal power
| plant is compared to vehicle engine (with a transmission,
| and stopping and going at traffic lights every so often),
| this is incredibly unlikely bordering on impossible in
| realistic conditions.
|
| Where are you getting those numbers?
| dbingham wrote:
| From the US Department of Energy. You can get emissions
| numbers per Kw for each location. You can get miles per
| KW for most EVs. From that you can calculate emissions
| per mile for an EV. Which is a number you can get for
| most standard gas engines. Then you can compare.
|
| But actually, I probably should have said "highly
| efficient ICE or hybrid" rather than reasonably
| efficient. It's been a while since I ran those numbers
| and the piece of info my brain stored was "Don't get an
| EV until I can charge it from solar". Either way, my
| overall point stands - EVs don't actually lead to the
| major emissions cuts advertised in most real world
| scenarios.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Right but a problem that exists in 100 places is far
| easier to solve than a problem that exists in 283,000,000
| places (in the case of ICE vehicles in the US).
|
| +1 to cities needing to be less car friendly regardless
| of how they're manufactured, but the reality is that
| large parts of the world (especially the US), there's
| just huge, huge, huge amounts of investment in a (yes,
| broken) model of urban planning that requires cars.
| Undoing that will be really hard and I don't think we can
| afford to wait - we should take every solution we can
| find, even if it's partial.
| dbingham wrote:
| Yeah, I agree we can't afford to wait for the urban
| planning model to change (and that changing it is going
| to require massive investments) so in the mean time we
| need to be encouraging people who can to go EV. But we
| need to do that alongside education about the urban
| planning model and the need to eventually get off cars
| entirely.
|
| We can't go around saying "Everyone go EV to solve
| climate change!" because it's not a solution, it's an
| iterative step to a mid-point towards a carbon neutral
| society.
|
| What we need to be saying is "Walk, bike, or ride the bus
| if you can. If you can't, look at your community and
| figure out why you can't, then work to change your
| community so you can. And in the mean time, drive an EV
| if you can afford it, or a fuel efficent used ICE if you
| can't."
| lm28469 wrote:
| Who's building nuclear power plants now ? Renewable sources
| of electricity are stacked on top of non renewable ones so
| far
|
| > Are you proposing that replacing ICE vehicles with EVs is
| not an essential part of a long-term, low-carbon future?
|
| Hm yes, a sustainable future won't be made of 3 tonnes
| personal steel cages transporting 1 person. There are 1.5B
| personal vehicles on earth right now, replacing every
| single one of them with the EV equivalent will just
| displace the problem (EVs generate half their lifetime
| pollution before even being driven on the street, then you
| have to take care about recycling, mining the raw
| materials, &c.)
|
| This is just another chapter of the "don't worry we'll
| magically figure it out sometime in the future (_cough
| cough_ after I got my dividends and retire)"
| unholiness wrote:
| I'm still missing a vision for a positive future which
| lacks EVs.
|
| Every vision of a low-carbon future requires many things
| to change. You're saying we should let the current slow
| movement on electricty generation be an excuse for not
| moving on EVs (despite the fact that they're an
| improvement regardless). You could similarly argue that
| the slow movement on EVs should be an excuse from not
| improving electricity generation (despite the fact that
| there are improvements regardless).
|
| Whataboutism about one vision is worthless until you have
| a better vision, where we can compare the practical and
| political tradeoffs between them.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Simple: no more personal cars
|
| But yeah that would require work, let's just cry about
| losing convenience and continue perpetuating the same
| cycle again, since we have no options but to commit to
| our clearly unsustainable model
| afarrell wrote:
| That would not solve the problems like transporting goods
| from ports and warehouses to stores or transporting
| equipment that a plumber or drummer needs to do their
| job. We'll still need electric trucks and vans.
| josefx wrote:
| > We'll still need electric trucks and vans.
|
| But that would still reduce the problem by a factor of
| what? 100? With all the other side effects of needing
| smaller roads, reducing congestion, ... .
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| GP specified that _mass_ adoption of EVs was not the
| solution, not that there were no applications for EVs in
| a carbon-zero future. Just like the carbon offsets in the
| OP article, simply replacing personal vehicles with EVs
| does little to nothing to reduce either the global energy
| expenditure or carbon emissions, it simply moves the
| energy budget around. Especially true when a plurality of
| electric power generation still comes from burning coal
| and natural gas. Removing personal vehicles _does_ reduce
| both energy expenditure and emissions (to the extent it
| is feasible, which covers probably >50% of personal
| vehicles; remember, while most of the US is not urban,
| most _people_ live in urban areas)
|
| EVs, like carbon offsets, are a necessary part of a
| carbon-zero future, but _they don 't actually get us any
| closer on their own_.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Presumably the parent has something more drastic in mind,
| like leveling every city and replanning it around bikes
| and extending public transit to every rural community.
| Basically treat every place like a dense urban area or
| force people to move into dense urban areas. At least
| those are the common, facile alternatives presented by
| the anti-car side of these debates. It's just urban
| chauvinism.
| afarrell wrote:
| Faced with an overwhelming problem, is is tempting to
| seek simple solutions which would boil the ocean.
|
| Personally, I'd prioritize suboptimal solutions which
| prevent a rise in ocean temperatures.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Maybe I'm not very clever, but it's hard to guess what
| you're driving at here.
| afarrell wrote:
| 1. An argument (that others are also making) that we need
| to be willing to accept partial solutions.
|
| 2. A pun.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Yes, I understand that. I'm not sure which is the
| "partial solution" in this scenario, EVs?
| kmeisthax wrote:
| I've never heard an anti-car person call for public
| transit in the sticks. It doesn't seem viable to me[0],
| and I'm pretty anti-car as is. Most people live in cities
| or suburbs now and I don't see that changing anytime soon
| - so it doesn't really make sense to disrupt the lives of
| people living in rural areas.
|
| While "make everything dense again" is kind of the end-
| goal, the way we get there isn't so much by "forcing"
| people to move into dense urban areas. At least, not
| unless you consider markets to be a form of coercion, in
| which case everything is "forced" all of the time and I
| have no argument for you. What happens is that we stop
| overplanning zoning codes, let commercial and residential
| zones mix, and allow the market to do it's job rather
| than just lining the pockets of whoever bought into the
| neighborhood 30 years ago.
|
| As to your point about urban chauvinism, I do want to
| point out that while New Urbanism (the thing you're
| talking about) is really prevalent in urban spaces, so
| are NIMBYs. It's not so much "everyone should live like
| us"; it's an argument between people who want city
| centers to actually be cities and people who still think
| mixed-use land is the path to crack-era Manhattan. Dense
| urban spaces are already so desirable now that pretty
| much every formerly-cheap neighborhood has been
| gentrified to the hilt. If more people want to live in a
| dense urban area, then why shouldn't the housing market
| be allowed to cater to that desire and expand the urban
| core outwards or upwards?
|
| [0] Though I _may_ be wrong about this. Part of the
| reason why Amtrak still exists in it 's current form is
| because it's a de-facto subsidy from Acela[1] riders to
| rural towns with no airport links.
|
| [1] Me: Mom, can I have a Shinkansen?
|
| Mom: No, we have a Shinkansen at home.
|
| Shinkansen at home: acela.jpg
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > I've never heard an anti-car person call for public
| transit in the sticks.
|
| I don't think anti-car people call for rural public
| transit as much as they ignore rural, suburban, and
| exurban areas altogether. They call for "banning cars"
| (or drastically reducing them) without articulating how
| this would actually work outside of dense cities.
|
| > While "make everything dense again" is kind of the end-
| goal, the way we get there isn't so much by "forcing"
| people to move into dense urban areas. At least, not
| unless you consider markets to be a form of coercion, in
| which case everything is "forced" all of the time and I
| have no argument for you. What happens is that we stop
| overplanning zoning codes, let commercial and residential
| zones mix, and allow the market to do it's job rather
| than just lining the pockets of whoever bought into the
| neighborhood 30 years ago.
|
| I'm kind of fine with this (I like walkable
| neighborhoods!). I would like more mixing of residential
| and commercial (more, smaller shops), but I think it's a
| foregone conclusion that this would result in the kind of
| dramatically increased density that makes European-style
| public transit ubiquitous (a lot of people _like_ space,
| and there 's _a lot_ of it in the US). I _certainly_ don
| 't think that's going to happen on a time scale that
| allows us to skip EVs while meeting climate targets like
| the OP suggests.
|
| > As to your point about urban chauvinism, I do want to
| point out that while New Urbanism (the thing you're
| talking about) is really prevalent in urban spaces, so
| are NIMBYs. It's not so much "everyone should live like
| us"; it's an argument between people who want city
| centers to actually be cities and people who still think
| mixed-use land is the path to crack-era Manhattan.
|
| I'm not sure what New Urbanism is, but I would be fine
| with urban people quibbling about how urban spaces should
| look (I live in a major US city); however, this debate
| isn't scoped exclusively to cities.
|
| > Dense urban spaces are already so desirable now that
| pretty much every formerly-cheap neighborhood has been
| gentrified to the hilt. If more people want to live in a
| dense urban area, then why shouldn't the housing market
| be allowed to cater to that desire and expand the urban
| core outwards or upwards?
|
| I don't think this is true except perhaps in NYC or the
| Bay Area. But in general I don't think anyone has a
| problem with the concept of expanding urban density
| (although there's surely some NIMBYism from people who
| don't want their suburb to be the target of urban
| expansion).
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| You're complaining about the environmental impact of
| reworking a few billion vehicles but blink at razing and
| rebuilding cities?
| aperson_hello wrote:
| And it would require massive amounts of time (building
| the new infrastructure to support this vision would take
| generations), which we don't have...
| barbazoo wrote:
| Sure it's not _the_ solution to the world's green house
| gas problem but as someone living in a province with
| about 97% of energy being hydro/geothermal/wind/solar,
| making the next car an EV should make a pretty big dent
| in one's personal CO2 footprint. You have to take your
| local energy mix into consideration.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Who's building nuclear power plants now ? Renewable
| sources of electricity are stacked on top of non
| renewable ones so far
|
| You're arguing against a straw man of your own making. No
| one is positioning EVs as the solution for generating
| clean energy. They are a solution for electrifying
| transportation which is a prerequisite for moving
| transportation from fossil fuel generation to clean
| energy. Moreover, the current average blend of energy
| sources in the US grid is already much cleaner than
| burning gasoline, and on top of that virtually all
| charging stations are powered by 100% renewable energy.
|
| > EVs generate half their lifetime pollution before even
| being driven on the street,
|
| This is an argument _in favor_ of EVs. Solar panels also
| produce all of their emissions prior to being plugged
| into the grid. This is precisely the mechanism by which
| they reduce carbon output relative to fossil fuel energy
| sources which have a large upfront carbon cost and then
| an even larger ongoing cost. It 's the same deal with
| EVs.
|
| > 3 tonnes personal steel cages transporting 1 person
|
| Well, we have to have some way of getting around, and
| most of the US is not dense urban area. Space is
| plentiful in the US, and anyway "steel cages carrying one
| person" isn't optimizing for space, not carbon emissions.
| Any sort of utopian restructuring of US transportation is
| going to involve way more carbon up front for decades to
| solve a relatively small part (transporting humans) of a
| problem that we need to have solved in decades.
|
| > This is just another chapter of the "don't worry we'll
| magically figure it out sometime in the future (_cough
| cough_ after I got my dividends and retire)"
|
| This kind of vapid, incorrect cynicism isn't helpful and
| probably violates the site rules. We already largely know
| how to drastically reduce our emissions--clean energy and
| electrification. EVs are part of the electrification
| story. There's not much to "magically figure out" except
| how to make renewable energy viable for base load
| generation _economically_ , but since any anti-car
| transportation solution is completely ignoring economy
| (not necessarily to be confused with "the economy")
| anyway, we can elide the "economically" requirement for
| base load generation in which case we already know how to
| get from here to there. In whichever case, EVs involve
| much less "magic" to solve than any anti-car alternative.
| trgn wrote:
| > We already largely know how to drastically reduce our
| emissions--clean energy and electrification
|
| I think the parent is arguing against this premise.
|
| You argue from a value system, in which cars for personal
| transportation, are an axiomatic condition. Not only
| that, cars, no matter their size, going as fast as
| geometry allows it, are an inherent fixture.
|
| Solutions like EVs are a solution to carbon emissions,
| but only within this value system.
|
| I can think of plenty of other solutions, all of them
| old-skool tech. Driving more frugal cars with high mpg
| (which will be lighter, smaller), would be a low-tech
| solution that anyone can implement today. However, since
| this is not in your value system, it does not occur to
| you. Since your value system is the dominant one,
| American car manufacturers no longer even want to put
| this solution up for sale. Not requiring people to
| commute, is another low-tech way we can curb carbon
| emission. Taxing cars by weight is a low-tech
| bureaucratic solution. A true forest of automated speed
| cameras to push top speeds down, and thus fuel
| consumption down, yet another one. Zoning which allows
| amenities in walking and biking distance is another, and
| infrastructure making walking and biking be safe, not
| having to worry about getting run over by 3-ton EVs,
| would be yet another low tech solution.
|
| None of the above curb quality of life. But rather, they
| exist in a world that cannot be imagined.
|
| > EVs involve much less "magic" to solve than any anti-
| car alternative.
|
| This quote is a perfect encapsulation of your solipsism.
| You cannot even imagine these other solutions, and if you
| do, they appear magic. While this "magic"is the reality
| on the ground in so much other parts of the world. Even
| within the US, they exist.
|
| EVs will not be a solution to curb carbon emissions. It
| is because EVs fundamentally do not address the root
| causes of why we have these emissions in the first place.
| The wasteful use of energy on personal transportation,
| caused by overly heavy, overly fast vehicles, having to
| drive over overly long distances, for even the most basic
| daily needs.
| generalenvelope wrote:
| Piggybacking to plug notjustbikes on youtube who does a
| nice job of outlining why the US's obsession with cars
| and single-family-zoned housing areas has dug us into the
| value system you're describing. That is not to say that
| working to fix these vast infrastructure problems is a
| simple or remotely carbon neutral feat (Amsterdam has
| taken 50 years to get there). We got here because of
| choices about how transportation/freedom in the US should
| look (many lobbied by the car industry). I'm not saying
| cars shouldn't exist. I don't think that's realistic with
| an area as vast as the US. But places like Amsterdam and
| Tokyo can clue us in that it doesn't need to be like this
| in reasonably dense areas.
|
| What if we could eliminate the _need_ for cars in many
| areas by creating infrastructure that 's vastly more
| efficient, cheaper, safer, and healthier to use? We
| already have a lot of this technology
| (bikes/trains/buses/trams + relevant infrastructure).
| Building this would be expensive and create a lot of
| pollution. Does that mean we shouldn't try?
| trgn wrote:
| notjustbikes is such a great channel. I think he paints a
| great picture of all forms of transportation existing
| side-by-side. It's not an either/or, but an and/and.
| Super inspiring channel.
|
| > What if we could eliminate the need for cars in many
| areas by creating infrastructure that's vastly more
| efficient, cheaper, safer, and healthier to use?
|
| Yes, that would be so great. Many neighborhoods in the US
| could accomodate it too. Roads are wide, there's
| absolutely space for different kinds of road use, side by
| side. And a lot of neighborhoods predate car travel,
| everything before the 30s or so, we know, as a historical
| fact, that they can totally be liveable without a car, if
| only it was safe for other road users to do so.
|
| > Does that mean we shouldn't try?
|
| Absolutely. The investment in safe road infrastructure,
| providing transportation options, has so many benefits.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > You argue from a value system, in which cars for
| personal transportation, are an axiomatic condition. Not
| only that, cars, no matter their size, going as fast as
| geometry allows it, are an inherent fixture. ... However,
| since this is not in your value system, it does not occur
| to you. ... You cannot even imagine these other solutions
|
| You're making so many baseless and incorrect assumptions
| about my value system and thought process that it's very
| hard to assume you're arguing in good faith. You're
| welcome to try again without making assumptions about my
| beliefs or capacity for imagination.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I don't see the connection to EVs. Certainly one can power
| EVs using coal-fired and gas-fired power plants, which just
| shifts the demand away from oil and towards coal and gas.
| However, people can also power their EVs off wind, solar or
| uranium power, whose production involves no fossil fuels. In
| contrast, ICE vehicles are locked into gasoline or diesel.
|
| Obviously, transition to EV is a key necessity for getting
| transportation off fossil fuels. Now, international jet
| travel and global shipping are not going to work with
| electric power due to lower energy density in batteries, but
| here we can simply do artificial photosynthesis, based on DAC
| and hydrogen from water, and generate carbon-neutral fuel
| with no need to sacrifice agricultural land.
| snewman wrote:
| I agree with most of this, but we keep finding clever ways
| to knock down sectors that had seemed impossible to
| electrify. For instance, FleetZero claims to have a
| practical approach for global shipping [1]. It's not yet
| proven, but I haven't seen a serious counter-argument.
|
| Even for jet travel, we may be able to whittle away at the
| problem with electric planes (or trains!) for short routes,
| and hydrogen for medium routes. Long routes may have to
| rely on artificial carbon-based fuels, as you say.
|
| [1] https://climateer.substack.com/p/better-than-fossil
| cheschire wrote:
| Perhaps GP had an issue with the battery technology itself.
| Obvious comments about rare or toxic mining aside,
| population center infrastructure isn't really designed to
| support everyone having battery based EVs.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| It's true that personal EVs are not that great in dense
| urban centers due to the congestion problem. Light
| electric rail, electric buses and bicycles are the better
| option.
| cheschire wrote:
| I'm going to sidestep the rail & bicycle hole here and
| focus on busses since those are the closest alternative
| in America specifically. I wish bikes were more feasible
| nationwide though.
|
| There are plenty of population centers that aren't
| densely urban. Cities in the 200k to 400k range seem like
| they're just starting to be big enough to support a
| regional bus system on their own, or with the support of
| a nearby larger city.
|
| The problem is how infrequently they would run though.
| Those cities tend to sprawl just a bit as they haven't
| made the full transition to multi-tenant dwellings so
| lots of folks would have to walk multiple blocks
| sometimes to get to a stop.
|
| Individually operated vehicles, namely cars, are still
| the name of the game for the vast majority of America.
| But then you run into the electrification issues I
| mentioned. A lot of these neighborhoods have very old
| electrical systems, and while we've made a ton of room by
| not running 60W light bulbs everywhere, I'm not sure we
| could handle charging 50k electric cars per night in many
| medium sized cities.
| datadata wrote:
| A single tree is likely to release its carbon at the end of its
| life. A forest however can permanently endure and keep retain
| carbon in aggregate, at least compared to the alternative
| barren ground. To your point though, I would be surprised if
| this effect is big enough relative to removing fossil fuels
| from the energy mix.
| Misdicorl wrote:
| I believe you can safely assume "it is not enough". We are
| recirculating literally millions of years worth of trees into
| the air. No amount of living carbon will be able to offset
| it, even if the entire earth were covered in trees (citation
| needed).
| datadata wrote:
| Citations seem to indicate this is actually enough! This
| surprised me also:
| https://www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/topics/global-carbon.
| Indicates 400GT are in from forests, vs 800GT in the
| atmosphere. Some various sources seem to indicate that
| around 50% of forests have been destroyed by humans already
| (by area, not necessarily by carbon?). So if we could
| instantly recover all forests, and nothing else changed,
| that alone would reduce the atmosphere CO2 to preindustrial
| levels (it has almost doubled). I think the misleading part
| about "millions of years worth of trees" is that a very
| small percentage of tree biomass probably becomes useful
| fossil fuel, and the majority is recycled many times.
| Misdicorl wrote:
| Wow, that really is surprising to me. This is the best
| non-personal news I've heard in probably a decade, so
| thanks for sharing!
| lalalandland wrote:
| Maybe we can grow crustaceans in massive numbers in the ocean?
| There have during earths history been huge deposits of carbon
| from such animals
| GordonS wrote:
| Changing an ecosystem is always a risky thing to do though,
| because there are long food chains, different species living
| in symbiosis, and just so very many variables.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| We will have to get good at it then-- we are already doing,
| just not trying to do it well. Engineering can function
| even in complex environments.
| dhc02 wrote:
| An interesting compromise would be that carbon "offsets" are
| available for purchase, but must be used to fund installation
| of renewable generation and energy storage infrastructure.
|
| So that carbon offsets are accelerating the transition away
| from carbon.
| okamiueru wrote:
| Isn't the carbon that make up trees a form of sequestration? I
| thought that was the "global warming counter measure" component
| of planting trees. But, perhaps this part of the equation can
| never be significant?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| One of the issues is that planting a tree is a _slow_ form of
| sequestration. An individual tree may sequester a lot of
| carbon over its lifetime (measured in decades) as it grows,
| but it doesn 't (and can't) immediately offset things as a
| seed or a sapling. Some carbon offset schemes attempt to
| amortize for this with accounting tricks, but for the most
| part when people are buying things like carbon offsets they
| are offsetting a pound of CO2 (or equivalent) emitted today
| with the hope that maybe a tree planted today will maybe
| sequester that pound over say the next ten years. (If it
| survives, if it is in a forest that is well maintained and
| hopefully not in a region prone to wildfires, if that forest
| is protected as an entity and not clear cut, and so forth.)
| yojo wrote:
| The problem is at some point the tree dies, decays, and
| releases the carbon it was holding.
|
| Contrast to an oil deposit which, left undisturbed, might
| never release its carbon.
| Joeri wrote:
| It doesn't release all its carbon. Much of the biomass does
| not end up back into the atmosphere but ends up in the
| ground. Those oil deposits were once forests.
| SamBam wrote:
| Thinking of it at the individual tree level is wrong.
|
| An acre of forest sequesters somewhere in the region of
| 30,000 lbs of carbon dioxide. Individual trees die and are
| reborn, but the forest as a whole, if it does not shrink,
| retains that carbon.
| yojo wrote:
| I'm not an expert on the market, but I don't think there
| are many carbon offsets sold as "we will plant and
| maintain an acre of forest in perpetuity."
|
| And frankly it's not something any organization can
| promise. Governments change and clear forest that was
| previously protected. Brazil provides a current and
| unfortunate example of this.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Also I wonder what ratio of those schemes are trees
| planted that would have anyway been planted for
| industrial forestry... We grow trees for reasons. And if
| there is extra cash in it there is few who don't take it.
| rsync wrote:
| "An acre of forest sequesters somewhere in the region of
| 30,000 lbs of carbon dioxide. Individual trees die and
| are reborn, but the forest as a whole, if it does not
| shrink, retains that carbon."
|
| But it's even more complicated than that ...
|
| We are reforesting ~20 acres of woodland just outside of
| San Francisco and we are not, as you say, thinking about
| individual trees - we are thinking of the woods as a
| whole ...
|
| ... which means clearing out a tremendous amount of
| sapling / deadwood / litter material that would quickly
| combust in a wildfire and destroy the entire forest.
|
| So while we are on track for planting >200 redwood and
| douglas fir trees, we have also had to cut down >100
| marginal trees to reduce fuel load. We're thinking on the
| scale of the entire forest and the entire forest needs to
| survive a burn ... including our relatively new trees
| that aren't as fire resistant as the old growth redwoods
| that were originally logged out of here.
|
| Generally speaking:
|
| The complexity of carbon mathematics is fraught and
| complex and I don't think it's reasonable to expect end
| users like consumers to navigate it.
| [deleted]
| renewiltord wrote:
| This is a time based problem. Even if we make a forest, and cut
| it down 30 years from now, we have won ourselves 30 years of
| sequestration. In those 30 years we can develop substitution
| tech.
| tunesmith wrote:
| I don't understand the general thrust of this argument. There are
| carbon offset companies that are investigated according to sets
| of standards, specifically to rule out abuses like planting trees
| that will just get cut down again.
|
| And I understand the basic system effects of: Currently it is
| cheap to buy enough offsets to cancel out one year of
| citizenship. If everyone does it, then these plentiful
| opportunities dry up - whether it's running out of land to plant
| trees or running out of pilot programs to bury carbon, it gets
| more expensive.
|
| But that's a feature, not a bug. It means that over that period
| of time, more externalities have been captured into the system,
| which is exactly what we want. If companies are mandated to buy
| offsets and they get expensive, then it creates the incentive to
| create more tech to be able to sequester more carbon. Which is
| what we want.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| The issue is that they need to be dramatically reducing their
| carbon footprint _right now_ to avoid catastrophic consequences
| 50 years from now (and even that is tenuous). Kicking the can
| down the road by paying a little tax from their record profits
| does not help.
| lettergram wrote:
| Who is always pushing and agreeing to reduce emissions? China and
| Russia. Who every year increases energy output (particularly non-
| green energy)?
|
| China and Russia.
|
| The west is now paying China and Russia to produce green
| technology. Which requires mass destruction and mining.
|
| At some point it would be nice to truly assess the situation...
|
| As someone who makes money from harvesting plants, I hope for
| higher carbon and a warmer climate. It means more, larger
| harvests. Cheaper food for all.
| EcoMonkey wrote:
| I fear that you've been misinformed on climate change's impact
| on agriculture. According to the 2018 National Climate
| Assessment[0], a rigorous accounting of climate change's impact
| on the United States by 13 federal agencies [1]:
|
| "Rising temperatures, extreme heat, drought, wildfire on
| rangelands, and heavy downpours are expected to increasingly
| disrupt agricultural productivity in the United States.
| Expected increases in challenges to livestock health, declines
| in crop yields and quality, and changes in extreme events in
| the United States and abroad threaten rural livelihoods,
| sustainable food security, and price stability. "
|
| Higher carbon and a warmer climate is going to mean smaller and
| less nutritious harvests, and food crises the world over. It is
| in your own self-interest to want rapid decarbonization.
|
| Also, you may not have heard that many climate policies call
| for a border carbon adjustment, which puts a WTO-compliant fee
| on imports from countries that are not effectively curbing
| their emissions. Well-designed national climate policies
| generally include this, as it largely addresses your valid
| concerns about making other countries play fair.
|
| Here's more[2] from NASA on it the impacts of climate change on
| agriculture.
|
| [0] https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/#sf-10 [1] NOAA, the DOA,
| DOC, DOD, DOE, HHS, DOI, DOS, DOT, EPA, NASA, NSF, Smithsonian
| Institution, and the USAID [2]
| https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3124/global-climate-change-imp...
| [deleted]
| Arnt wrote:
| "I liked the idea of carbon offsets, until I tried to explain it
| as if its aim were something it isn't. Then I found out that it
| was badly suited to the goal I imagined."
|
| As I remember the aim from when the carbon emission quotas were
| proposed and introduced, offset trading was meant purely as a
| transition mechanism, and wasn't intended to have any effect on
| the long-term situation afterwards. All the carbon emitters at
| the time got large quotas valid for a long time, so large that
| noone protested much. Later, the idea was that the quotas should
| be reduced and then lead to quotas being sold sale and emitters
| closing down.
|
| This what happens now, as I see it. I read about a company
| recently that decided to replace its vehicle park with zero
| emission vehicles, but gradually, and buy carbon offsets from
| someone to compensate for the old vehicles. So someone with one
| of those old quotas shuts down a polluting plant a few years
| earlier than necessary and sells an offset, someone gets to brag
| about zero carbon vehicles quite soon in the process of replacing
| their vehicles. The offsets mean that both of them can get a PR
| win, and arguably push both of them stop emitting carbon a little
| earlier than would otherwise be the case. It's a win-win effect
| on the transition and has nothing to do with anything other than
| the transition.
| bwanab wrote:
| I've got a funny feeling that the author didn't really understand
| how offsets are supposed to work. Consider the example of all the
| rain forests. Assume they've all been sold off, but we still
| haven't reduced carbon in the atmosphere. So far so bad, but
| given that, there are still going to be emitters left who'd like
| to keep emitting. To do that, they've got to bid the price of
| credits up. But any owner of credits that wants to sell now has
| to find a way to reduce emissions so they can sell. As the price
| of credits goes up, the incentives become reducing emissions to
| profit from selling credits.
|
| It's trying to align firm's desire to profit with reducing
| emissions.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Any thoughts on carbon credit ETFs?
| Gimpei wrote:
| There's something I'm not understanding in this critique . If
| somebody buys a whole bunch of trees, that would presumably
| increase the price of lumber overall and thus encourage a
| substitution away from lumber. So somebody certainly could chop
| down some other trees, but now the opportunity cost would be
| higher. The more people bidding for trees in order to offset
| emissions, the greater this opportunity cost would be. Isn't this
| precisely a "market solution"?
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Additionality means that it wouldn't have happened without the
| offset. It's nice that we _should_ or _need to_ do X, but if X
| isn 't going to happen, then any action that causes X to happen
| is a positive change. If it's a "valid" offset, then we already
| know X wasn't going to happen without it, regardless of whether
| it _should_ or _must_ happen.
|
| Double counting is a serious problem here, of course, and the
| article is right that removal based offsets alone cannot get us
| to net zero. What genuine offsets (i.e. those that actually meet
| the 4 required criteria) _can_ do is that (finite) resources get
| invested where they 're more effective, letting us achieve
| specific intermediate goals earlier than without them.
|
| That's actual kilograms of CO2 that aren't in the atmosphere by a
| certain date.
|
| _" If Everyone Did It, Would It Still Work?"_ - until we
| actually get to net zero, yes, actually. As the cheap and easy
| opportunities go away, genuine offsets become much more
| expensive, to the point where avoiding the emissions will often
| be cheaper than offsetting them. Likewise, as regulation tightens
| towards net zero, the opportunities for offsets that meet the
| "additionality" requirement go toward zero too.
|
| There are many serious issues with offsets (like the lack of
| additionality, double counting, non-permanence, and leakage, as
| mentioned in the article), but the article makes it sound like
| they can't work even theoretically.
|
| _" "Preserving an acre of rainforest" fails the test. Suppose
| all of the world's cement plant operators agreed to offset their
| emissions this way. Suppose that this succeeds so well that 100%
| of the world's remaining rainforests are protected forever."_ -
| then the offsetting potential of rainforest protection is
| exhausted, and other ways to get to net zero will need to be
| found. Also, the "additionality" criterion should, if applied
| correctly, already limit the amount of offsets you can get out of
| protecting the rainforest.
| parkingrift wrote:
| The most hilarious (sad?) aspect of offsets is tree rental.
| Promise to maintain a forest for 100 years and cities, states, or
| countries will pay you to "offset" their emissions. Average adult
| lifespan is about 55 years but perhaps these forest rental
| services are making promises on behalf of their unborn
| grandchildren.
|
| ...and please ignore the basic fact that no one can guarantee a
| forest will survive. Fires happen.
| [deleted]
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