Many years ago, I actively engaged the political discussion surrounding carbon markets, as I thought I might be able to help. I've been directly involved in similar types of international negotiations, albeit at a smaller scale and unrelated to carbon markets. Talking to people involved in the carbon market negotiation made it abundantly clear why there will never be a useful outcome.
Most of the governments involved in negotiating a common international agreements on carbon markets unofficially represent for-profit interests seeking advantage in the structure of the carbon market. There is an enormous amount of profit that can be realized here, and the good faith actors are in the minority. This is quite normal even in small international agreements but it becomes exponentially harder to arrive at an agreement that is minimally corrupted with respect to its nominal purpose as the profit incentive to corrupt the agreement increases. The last time I looked in on the current state of the carbon market negotiations, it had been corrupted beyond redemption. I have no faith that something useful will result.
This is why international agreements are unlikely to have a material impact on climate change. International agreements tend to only be effective when there is minimal profit or advantage to be gained by corrupting the purpose of the agreement. Climate change activities simply involve too much money for an international agreement to produce a credible outcome. It is the wrong tool for the job.
Right when you or I look at it we say that the biggest producers need to buy the most carbon credits. When coal and manufacturing look at it they say those industries need the most exemptions because they emit the most carbon.
Sadly, international agreement is the only hope because it is a global problem. For example, if California will go 0 emissions tomorrow, it will hardly matter if the rest of the world would remain on the current trajectory.
If Burundi goes 0 emissions tomorrow it hardly matters
If California does, it matters :
- It shows it is possible, and increase political pressures on others
- It create a pressure and market (California is big enough and Burundi or Alaska are not) for new solutions (technology based or not) that can be implemented elsewhere
- It help decreasing the cost of many existing solutions, and everybody will benefits from it
- It is possible to set up carbon tax at the border, increasing the incentive to follow California path
There will never be international agreement. No one will agree to put themselves at a disadvantage compared to everyone else. So greener technology will have to become the cheapest option or you'll have to commit mass murder to force other nations to submit against their will.
Carbon taxes are easy. You tax anyone who pulls it out of the ground or imports it. With international agreements you might drop the import tax and let to source country tax the extraction. The producers will just pass the added cost on to the users. Even this simple solution will be shot down by politics.
It’s a fat regressive tax at a time when the lower working class is already rebelling. Invest more in technology and instead increase subsidies and build transmission lines
You can make it non-regressive by paying a dividend that is funded by the carbon tax revenues. This is also a possible mechanism for making it revenue-neutral, which could be politically advantageous.
I believe the common name for this approach is "fee and dividend". I'm surprised I don't see it discussed very much. I would think that it should be palatable across the political spectrum.
Working examples of carbon taxes are revenue neutral by design but people don't understand that it would redistribute the money to low income people who can't afford e.g. expensive international flights. They would rather have no tax instead. So nothing will happen unless it happens through a backdoor.
Not the OP, but the best approach to climate change to me seems to make it so it's more expensive to produce energy that damages the climate. The government's role in this would be to take steps to encourage these kinds of developments. This certainly seems within our grasp, if we had the willpower to disband the top-down approaches being advocated and ones that will never work because it's asking the developing world to ... stop developing. If they don't stop emitting we're all doomed.
In contrast, if one or more countries develop a cheaper, clean technology that can be exported globally (perhaps at a cost) all countries would be incentivized to switch to it to save costs, and emissions start to plummet.
We need a full court press on getting to next-generation energy sources that stand to be 10x cheaper than existing ones. I'm not sure if you can get there with solar and other renewables alone, but from first principles (ie physics) it sure seems tractable to get there with some combination of nuclear technology and those sources.
There are heavy subsidies to fossil fuel (4.7 trillons a year globally says the IMF)... Mostly negative externalities. Carbon tax can be seen as a tax... or as the end of a subsidy, allowing to get the most efficient solutions for the people
I disagree, I think it's just simple greed. Capitalists are more-or-less rational and not unintelligent. Greed explains why e.g. VW would cheat on emissions tests, etc.
Carbon trading is a scheme for bankers to profit from climate change. The solution is simple —carbon tax. Additionally it is ideal for the carbon tax to be revenue neutral.
A carbon tax would have similar incentives. Green producers and products get taxed less than brown producers. It also doesn’t matter if the product comes from Timbuktu or Savannah, it just matters how green or not green it is.
Carbon trading would result in billionaires and large funds finding a new way to make more money at the expense of everyone else and solve little.
Carbon trading is a huge subside to the current polluters at the expensive of future polluters, indifferent to future polluters polluting more or less than current ones.
It is a great way to destroy a market (and a very important one), creating monopolies everywhere.
Carbon trading works great as long as two things are true:
1) The total amount of emissions are set for all participants with the sum of all participants emissions being set based on current scientific data for stopping climate change.
2) No double counting. If you sell it off you can't also use it.
The climate talks failed on the carbon trading discussions because people would not agree to those.
While carbon tax is nice and possible a good method to combat climate change, it is not immune to those problems. Carbon tax also have an rather uneven impact, so I personally see it as a tool to be used in specific industries where the benefit costs analysis show the intended incentives without causing unintended side effects such urbanization.
And how would your carbon tax work without allowing others to profit from it? Excise taxes already exist, they just go to fund more government that is still perpetually out of money to do the things that "must be done".
At which point you increase the size of the bureaucracy and the state leading to more government control. A decade or two later there's a financial crisis and the government just happens to tap into the carbon tax fund as a "temporary measure" or perhaps the fund just lends money to the government that the government eventually can't pay back.
I'm saying that whichever way you slice it, it's still possible for this to be abused.
Well, not really. If run at the national level, once carbon dividends become ingrained in the public's mind it becomes a political 3rd rail to raid that cookie jar. Welfare benefits are very hard to claw back.
And w.r.t. size of the bureaucracy, not so much either. The size of actual government bureaucracy is quite insignificant compared to size of transfer payments in this case. Like 1% or less.
And this particular tax has fantastic property; since it will drive down carbon use, the amount of tax collected will go down over time, thus reducing it's drag on the economy.
Hardcore market fundamentalists, like myself, love carbon taxes.
I agree with your post, but I would note that this is not entirely true in the US. Benefits that such as SNAP and Medicaid that are only used by a vulnerable segment of the population have been a frequent target for clawbacks. Social Security and Medicare are much more resistant to politically-motivated clawbacks yet not resistant to meddling in general since they are not enjoyed equally.
A benefit that exists at the level of “everyone gets $N per month” would seem to be much more resistant to political meddling.
>If run at the national level, once carbon dividends become ingrained in the public's mind it becomes a political 3rd rail to raid that cookie jar.
The US government has a debt problem. The Social Security fund has lent money to the US government. Why can't similar things happen for the carbon tax fund?
This is not very surprising, is it? How many more data points do we need to conclude that COPs never achieve anything? I think it’s time to acknowledge that our “leaders” have failed us.
This is the thesis of Naomi Klein books. Current political system and pseudo-market solutions are incapable of solving the climate problem. And so far, unfortunately it is proven right.
I do agree in principle (with some reservations perhaps).
Except that if we instituted a simple carbon auction it's provably effective (not just theoretical, it very effective for NOx and SOx). I suppose that's not a pseudo market solution, that's a real market solution, unlike all of the trading proposals being put forth at the moment.
An auction is a tax in disguise, the only difference is that if the government doesn't get the quantity exactly right it will either make the whole thing toothless or destroy its own economy.
About NOx and SOx, those are local pollutants. Local problems are much easier to fix.
Have you ever tried to convince someone of taking even moderate climate-related action? I happen to think leaders may actually be a bit too far ahead of the population they represent when it comes to climate change.
There's no room for moderates in today's political climate. "You are either completely on board or you are against me" so the current zeitgeist goes. Essentially you have to align your beliefs and talking points with /r/politics and /r/enlightenedcentrism, or you are just closeted alt right.
If you want something to ever actually be done, then there absolutely is a point for moderation. If you just go along with whatever people label as "saving the climate" then you're going to be taken for a ride. People don't like being taken for a ride, thus they resist what makes their life more difficult.
> People don't like being taken for a ride, thus they resist what makes their life more difficult.
I doubt it. People don’t want to reduce consumption. People want their detached houses and front and back yards, they want their international vacations, domestic vacations, they want to drive around without thinking how much it will cost them. People want to see their children live easier lives than them, not harder. Conveniently ignoring their great great grandchildren’s lives, but there’s comfort in plausible deniability of not knowing the future.
>> People don't like being taken for a ride, thus they resist what makes their life more difficult.
> I doubt it.
Are you willing to consider it as a possibility though?
No doubt the remainder of what you say is true, to an unknown degree (ignore this at your own peril), but if you had god-like omniscience to simultaneously see into the minds (including the subconscious) of all people on the planet, the true reality of their beliefs and what sort of compromises they would be willing to make under certain conditions - might the material aspects play less of a role in the impasse than you and others think?
Draw upon the knowledge (personal, and observations of third parties) you have about human relationships, particularly conflict. Have you noticed that sometimes people don't behave completely rationally, sometimes going so far as to even lie to themselves about why they do the things they do? Are there sometimes situations where a minor disagreement finds a way to grow into a full on battle where the original objective disagreement has faded into the background, the fight itself takes on a life of its own, and people revert to their irrational, tribal, caveman roots, seeking no particular goal other than revenge?
Might there be some aspect that creeps into the political realm? If it did, what might it look like? Might it look something like irrational, dishonest & disingenuous, hate-filled discussions in social media, as opposed to good faith fact-based discussions where both parties are seeking to achieve a state of mutually beneficial compromise? Do we see any evidence of these two conversation types taking place in social media today?
Jonathan Haidt is the only academic I know of that seems to have noticed this aspect of the situation (as related to political polarization, not climate change) and set his mind to studying it. Does anyone know of others?
I think you're right in a way you don't mean to be. There was room for moderates in the 90's and 00's. We have unfortunately blown our time window for a moderate response. Think of it like knowing your paper is due at the end of the semester, but not starting till a week before. You don't get to do the paper in a measured and pragmatic way anymore, you already chose not to, your only options now are a sloppy panicked rush, or failure. Yes the sloppy panicked rush may also lead to failure, but the operating margin for moderate solutions is almost entirely exhausted: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM1...
edit: yet again i'm downvoted to -2 because I dare explain the shape of the curves in plain english and then link to my source (the canonical authoritative source no less).
hacker news is swarming with climate change denalists downvoters.
Why I think you reach the wrong conclusion, using your analogy:
Say you're a week from the paper being due, and need to decide between an A thesis and a B thesis.
The A thesis would be great, but you simply can't do the research necessary to prove it in a week. If you went with it your paper would be a complete failure because you'd either spend all your time on research and not have enough time to do the actual writing of the paper, or you decide to spend most of your time writing the paper but it's impossibly to make the arguments because you simply don't have the facts necessary.
Instead you pick the B quality thesis, and write a workable paper arguing for it. Sure your paper would be better with a better thesis, but given your position when you started it was your best option.
With climate change, if we let perfect be the enemy of the good we might end up doing nothing which is clearly worse than doing something insufficient. Badness scales (nonlinearly) with amount we reduce emissions. We want the best solution we have the ability to implement. (Figuring that out is the hard part, and I don't know enough to do that).
Note: Your source is worthless in this forum. No one is going to read through hundreds of pages to figure out if they support your claim. It would be as if I wrote nothing but "You're wrong (cite the Encylcopedia Brittanica)". I'm pretty sure you're right, ironically because of reputable secondary sources I've read that summarized the report.
> With climate change, if we let perfect be the enemy of the good we might end up doing nothing which is clearly worse than doing something insufficient.
That is exactly what you are doing in arguing for delay and moderation. To the tune of 38 gigatonnes per year.
> Note: Your source is worthless in this forum. No one is going to read through hundreds of pages to figure out if they support your claim.
I linked to a JPG with three 1960 - 2100 graphs that lay out exactly what number of gigatons leads to what warming on what timeframe. It is "Figure 1" from the "Summary for Policy Makers". There is nothing more basic or dumbed down that can still be called science.
> That is exactly what you are doing in arguing for delay and moderation. To the tune of 38 gigatonnes per year.
I'm arguing for implementing an imperfect plan sooner. I don't understand what you mean.
> I linked to a JPG with three 1960 - 2100 graphs that lay out exactly what number of gigatons leads to what warming on what timeframe. It is the absolute barest possible minimum you should understand to have an informed opinion on the topic.
You're completely right. I saw the start of the link and assumed you linked to the full report.
What imperfect plan is there? The low hanging fruit are Renewables (and nuclear as last resort) and electrification of transport. Unfortunately they depend on the construction of a grid that is built for decentralized power generation compared to large scale central power plants. This requires government action. The only major roadblock to electric cars is the missing charging infrastructure. You can get a nice used EV for 15k€ or less and it will pay for itself because electricity is cheaper than gas. Again we need the government to act before apartments will be equipped with chargers.
At any event insisting on a moderate solution now can still be smart because it moves the Overton window making more complete solutions politically feasible in the future.
The likely objection to your argument is that people don't really think there's much of a difference whether we start action today or in 5 years. Yes, it will be more difficult, but actually taking the right steps is probably more important.
There's a million ways how some bad steps being taken could end up in a catastrophe. Look at the situation with the Amazon and how aggressive some countries are against the Brazilian government. Some countries (France) are even bypassing the government to deal with local authorities. Situations like that can very quickly spiral out of control. They might make people be even less accepting of doing something about climate change and they can even spark political instability, which very well can lead to hot conflicts.
The climate situation is going to progressively get worse. It will even accelerate the rate at which it gets worse, but it's not going to explode like a bomb. Political situations can explode like that and when that happens, then nobody will care about climate change.
We can't afford not to be moderate on an issue like this. You can't solve climate change at once. It'll take sustained effort and a lot of time. You can't build it on shaky ground.
>hacker news is swarming with climate change denalists downvoters.
This type of attitude is a huge problem for people advocating for changes to be made due to climate change. You're asking for a lot of people's lives to become more difficult, but when they question or disagree on almost any point they are labelled evil and stupid.
>This type of attitude is a huge problem for people advocating for changes to be made due to climate change. You're asking for a lot of people's lives to become more difficult, but when they question or disagree on almost any point they are labelled evil and stupid.
Exactly. This is true of most policy disagreements. Just because you think my plan won't do what I propose it will do doesn't mean you're stupid and evil, even if some other people are opposing it because they are stupid and evil.
To carry your analogy further, it feels like we're just going to not hand the paper in and try to hide the report card so that the parents don't find out.
Wrong: I am quite happy to vote for binding hard choices if I can be assured that there are no exemptions - and no mechanism to engineer exemptions once I have put me and mine at a disadvantage.
Since none can tell me how we are going to enforce this, I withdraw my vote.
There won't be a carbon tax in Germany. People are allergic to anything that has tax in the name. Instead Angela Merkel has chosen to strengthen the CO2 certificate trade in Germany which is known to be ineffective by design [0]. So if international carbon trading doesn't work either then that means there is no effective policy that will allow us to reach our CO2 goals.
The only hope that we have left is that speculative investors drive up the price. The more middlemen the better. If everyone bought 100€ worth of certificates every year and only sold when the price goes up it and keep them forever if the price goes down then this would at least simulate the effects of a CO2 tax because the effects would ripple through the entire economy without requiring action from politicians.
Paying directly for your own carbon sequestration doesn't work because it only has local effects, doesn't encourage prevention of emissions and it is effectively a letter of indulgence ("I'm free of my sin").
[0] many sectors are exempt, a base amount of certificates is handed out for free, the price is always low because there are too many CO2 certificates
Given that a lot of the representatives flew to the climate talks, and did not reach any sort of climate deal, the COP25 resulted in a lot of CO2 production for no benefit.
Flying results in 2% of global CO2 emissions a year. That's hundreds of thousands of flights a day over an entire year.
Coal powered electricity results in an incredible amount of green house emissions, and it's just plain bad for the environment. How about we stop complaining about flying and stop using coal? Please, note I didn't say fossil fuels, I said coal:
> Please, note I didn't say fossil fuels, I said coal: (link to an article arguing in favor of natural gas).
Sadly, the science is not that simple. When calculating the green house emissions from natural gas we also have to include methane leaks during production. Depending on what numbers you use, around 30% of all methane emissions in the US come from fracking, and methane is 28 times worse than carbon. Combined the methane and carbon dioxide from natural gas is a bigger contributor to green house effect than coal.
Of course coal is still very bad. If fracking contribute about 30% of the methane emissions, coal mining also contribute by around 9% and coal energy plants release about twice the amount of carbon in the air compared to natural gas.
The numbers also get a bit more complex if one consider short term vs long term climate change. Methane residence time in the atmosphere is much shorter than carbon dioxide, so after the current crisis of climate change the pollution that burning coal causes is harder to remove than natural gas. The damage however from climate change can be harder or impossible to fix, so its not a clear cut which of natural gas or coal is worse for our current situation.
Best is just to keep both in the ground and use hydro, geothermal, and nuclear as base load and supplemental wind/solar for industries that can take advantage of variable energy production.
Methane's contribution to Global Warming is just not that large. Unless you change something that multiplies emissions by 5 or more, it's just not worth focusing on. The problem is almost entirely caused by CO2, and changing the focus from it is detrimental.
Besides, the low residence time makes its contribution proportional to the rate of emission, instead of the total emitted (like CO2). That makes human-emitted methane a much easier problem to solve: if you start fighting it, the problem reduces. So, again, unless it's a large problem, it's not worth ignoring other sources to focus on it.
So, yes, coal is most of the short term problem, and nearly all of the long term problem. Coal is also the only one available on enough quantity to become a catastrophic problem. It's also a hugely disproportionate problem at the local level. It is also the one with worst economic ramping-down possibilities. Coal is the problem to solve, and if it requires increasing our methane emission by some less than 100%, it is still a non-brainier.
(Of course, on the next decades we will have to replace oil and gas by renewables anyway, or go without. And the sooner we do that, the better. But if it takes the focus away from coal, it better wait.)
During fracking, the industry standard is a loss of about 3% that leaks into the atmosphere. 3% might not sound much but at 28 times the effect of C02 it has a measurable effect on global warming.
I don't think I have seen any climate change research that say we can reach the goals and increase methane emission. If anything most seems to say that we need to reduce both CO2 and methane. Call me very skeptical to the claim that we could increase out methane emission by anything near 100% and still manage, but I am open to see sources.
I can't find a clear source for worldwide emissions, but every site I can find [1] [2] makes methane responsible for around 10% of the total heating. Because of the short life, doubling the emission rate would make it responsible for much less than 20% of the total heating.
The choice of focusing on 80% of the problem or 20% of it is a non-brainier. Now, I have no idea if it will satisfy your goal.
“We” could stop using coal tomorrow and it wouldn’t make the slightest difference. China’s out-of-control coal mine fires alone amount to more CO2 emissions than most countries and that is still a tiny fraction of their total.
Flying is relevant because nothing undermines the message more than “you must curtail your lifestyle but I won’t mine”. Exactly how many climate summits have been held over videoconferencing? My employer has massively cut back on flying to meetings, we have a big screen in every meeting room instead, it works pretty well. Meanwhile politicians and celebrities refuse to cut back on private jets. There’s no truer form of climate denial than that!
China's CO2 production per capita is half of that of US
... and their total emission is already double that of the US. Are you saying China take no action until they achieve parity per capita? I can think of no other reason you would mention “per capita”.
Nice condescension, but the "per capita" argument is still complete nonsense. When China achieves parity "per capita" with the US - which it is on track to do within the next decade - but with 4x the population, will you finally understand?
Unless you can make the case that the average person in the US is entitled to put more CO2 into the globally shared atmosphere than the average person in China, per capita is the only way to fairly access whether a country is contributing more or less than its fair share.
Yes, it would be bad if Chinese per capita use rose to match US per capita use, because US per capita use is already way over what is sustainable globally.
The environment doesn’t care what anyone is “entitled” to and the West knows this and is a case study about how hard it is to reduce. I find it bizarre that anyone suggests it’s sensible for China to get there and only then start to reduce, because they are “entitled to”.
Of course, the West is already on that downward trend and China is soaring upwards with no signs of even plateauing. Within 10 years China will be technologically independent of the West and the West will have even less influence over its environmental policy than we do now.
> I find it bizarre that anyone suggests it’s sensible for China to get there and only then start to reduce, because they are “entitled to”
No one has suggested that. You, however, have suggested that there is no point in the US lowering its emissions because China emits more total than does the US.
The atmosphere does not care about arbitrary political boundaries. There's a total amount of greenhouse gases we can put in it consistent with keeping global warming under any given target. A ton of CO2 from a person in China is the same as a ton of CO2 from a person in the US as far as the atmosphere is concerned.
So if a random person in China being responsible for putting about 8 tons in per year is unacceptable, then by what logic is a random person in the US putting in over 16 tons a year fine? By every physical measure, that US person is doing at least twice the harm to the atmosphere.
The US needs to be the leader on this, not making excuses not to reduce its own emissions.
Which is exactly why there is no difference between sixteen tons from eight people and sixteen tons from sixteen people. The emissions per capita alone is totally meaningless.
The reason that per country emissions are important is that countries are convenient political and demographic units.
high profile failures like this are exactly why i'm taking things into my own hands and starting a company dedicated to making the voluntary purchase of carbon credits/offsets accessible to the public and to small/mid-sized companies.
we can't wait for the political leadership to get their game together any longer, and we can't wait for the part of the population that doesn't belive there is a crisis to come around either.
we need to start financing the prevention or removal of carbon from the atmosphere today, using the voluntary carbon markets that we have. there aren't another five or ten years of indecision that we can afford to waste. and we don't have any better system for emissions reductions, yet.
those of us who understand the gravity of our present climate situation have the burden of carrying everyone else on our backs to the extent that we are able. addressing our planet's health is not something that will be fair in terms of the responsibilities that we need to take. an idealistic few must come forth and create the means for our mutual salvation, and they can expect only to thanklessly toil in the short-term.
it's a bitter pill to swallow, but we need to accept it and start moving forward rather than getting mired in spite towards those who won't help, or fatalism that we can't change our situation. taking action will be our protection against depression, and chipping away at our planet's climate crisis will inspire others to join our efforts.
send me an email (it's in my profile) if you want to help/join me. i need anyone and everyone who wants to contribute.
but be warned: if you want to join my effort, at present i can promise you nothing but my appreciation and the assurance that you're trying to be one of the good guys.
As I understand it, the voluntary purchase of carbon credits and offsets is already accessible to the public and to small to mid-sized companies, no?
I am fully with you on the importance of acting now on any grounds we can, politically, financially, with business, etcetc, don't get me wrong.
In what way will your business differ from other carbon offset businesses? I google, and I find terrapass. I donate to cotap on a monthly basis. All of these are very accessible, or am I missing something?
sure, offsets are technically purchaseable -- if you know what they are, where to buy them, which sellers are reputable, which type of offset/credit/other carbon instrument you want to buy, what's the difference between different types of carbon instrument, how retirement of an instrument works, etc.
you are probably someone who cares about this stuff roughly a million times more than the average member of the public, but for most people, the actions you specified aren't on the radar.
nobody i've spoken to has even known about offsets, nevermind what they do or how to access the markets as an individual. people do vaguely know about the idea of "cap and trade", but that's not exactly something they think of as being relevant to their lives or their efforts to mitigate climate change, even if it is.
there's a huge gap between the public's willingness to participate in these type of carbon reduction plans and their knowledge about how to actually do so and how much they should actually be contributing to make up for their personal carbon footprint.
i'm not proposing to do anything revolutionary. creating a new source of offsets is a non-starter. my idea is merely to close the gap.
to inform people that they aren't powerless, and to reduce the friction of navigating the carbon markets at the scale they would prefer.
Thanks for the reply, your line of thought makes a lot of sense. Most people I know, even the ones that care about the climate don't know about carbon offsets. If your primary purpose is to reach a wider audience, I applaud your efforts!
I agree. The plant to get everyone on board has failed. The only option left is to solve your own emissions in a way that forces everyone else to follow suit.
You can buy EU CO2 certificates and resell them for a profit which makes emitting CO2 uneconomical because of all of the middlemen who are taking their cut. If you never sell them below the purchase price they won't result in emissions. It's a win win situation.
it's true, offsets can't prevent purchasers from adding to their emissions, if they choose to act in contradiction to the spirit of purchasing offsets in the first place (mitigating the emissions which cannot be immediately reduced for whatever reason to buy time for when they can be reduced).
however, they can fund projects to help people with less money to reduce their emissions by an equal amount, generating a large value in beneficial externalities as a result.
if i purchase an offset and the proceeds go to a hydropower project in india, there's a lot more going on there than the compensation for one ton of emissions alone.
There are hundreds of news articles about the COP 25 and somehow we chose the Financial Times as the article we should comment on. That says a lot about our bewilderment (cf. their self-serving focus on carbon trading).
What it says to me: I know that climate change is an extremely serious problem we need to solve and I believe economics is the right place to look for the tools we'll need to incentive people to do better.
Economics has already given us the solution long ago. Climate is an externality. You solve problems with externalities by pricing them into goods and services. That was clear for climate change back in the 90’s. Everything since then has not been in the realm of economics but of politics. If the climate change problem will be solved, the solution will have to be political.
Corporate and consumerism waste needs to be addressed first.
-Leasing new cars every 3 years
-New iPhone every 2-4 years
-New clothes every season
-Corporate flights vs teleconferencing
-Amazon should be there own investigation
Wouldn't bundling the costs of the negative externalities associated with the production of the new cars, iPhones, and clothes as a tax levied against the manufacturers "address" the "consumerism waste"? Manufacturers are very good at passing costs on to consumers, and innovating to drive costs down in the face of competition. If your goal really is to reduce environmental impact (and not just being "anti-consumerist") then it would seem like using the market to do that would make more sense vs. trying to change the habits of mass numbers of individuals.
What does new clothes have to do with climate change? In the scheme of things it's all about vehicle emission and coal fired power plants. Everything else pales in comparison so focus on those.
> Longest-ever round of negotiations fails to make progress on key issue
> The UN climate talks in Madrid ended in stalemate on Sunday, with the negotiations running two days overtime as countries squabbled over rules for a new global carbon trading market.
> At 14 days the talks, known as COP25, set a record for the longest-ever climate negotiations, but failed to produce any agreement about the rules for trading in carbon credits.
> Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, said: “Governments need to completely rethink how they do this, because the outcome of COP25 is totally unacceptable.”
[]
> Geopolitical tension and the absence of leadership from the US and China, the world’s two biggest emitters, severely handicapped the negotiations, which descended into open bickering on the plenary floor during the final hours of the talks.
> The Paris climate accord, which aims to limit global warming to well below 2C, has been signed by 197 countries in the world, but the US is in the process of withdrawing from it and will leave the pact next November.
> The EU delegation said it was disappointed that the meetings failed to find agreement on carbon markets.
>And it can be solved in the finance field with cheaper energy sources.
In Germany the market prices for electricity go down but at the same time the residential rates go up massively. There are two reasons for that. Firstly coal plants can't throttle down but PV and wind farms get paid anyway through a surcharge. Secondly large industrial consumers are exempt from the surcharge. This means residential users are paying the electric bills of aluminum smelters, etc. In other words. The cheaper the electricity in Germany the higher the final price. Isn't that absurd?
The surcharge wouldn't be needed if there was a working CO2 tax or carbon trade system because all coal plants would be shut down and replaced by load following natural gas plants which only run when truly necessary.
I agree with you that government regulation can't solve the problem, but I think that government has to be a part of solving the problem. They have to make solving the problem financially reasonable. We will need money to be spent on taking carbon out of the atmosphere. Companies aren't going to do that without a financial incentive.
I'm not convinced technology is going to help us. We have had amazing efficiency gains for aircraft but increased air travel has eaten all the gains and a lot more. We have built more efficient cars but wasted that by building bigger cars and driving them further. Insulation standards in homes have increased but we build bigger homes further from the centres. The list goes on and on.
The only thing that has made a real difference is switching from coal to gas in places like the UK. But even then gas heating in our homes is emitting more CO2 than any other sector.
Wind and solar are too intermittent to replace base load, there isn't enough cobalt in the world to build enough storage, there probably isn't enough uranium to switch everyone to nuclear.
I can't see people accepting a shift from an energy system based on stocks to one based on flow and the intermittency that comes with that. My neighbours go a bit bananas when the power is off for thirty minutes.
The only way this is getting sorted is if a benevolent AI takes the world by force. And that's not going to happen on this timeline. So we are pretty much assured to be descending into resource wars, mass migration and civil unrest. Trump, Boris and Brexit are the first signs of the developed world pulling up the drawbridges. It's kind of like an emotional response within the brain. We feel trouble significantly before we can reason about it. The emotional response is the fast, unthinking systems of the mind which respond to danger. People on the ground are feeling the danger even though they can't quite put their finger on the reason. And so we get polarisation and isolationist policies.
From personal perspective - and I would definitely be classified here as a carbon tax obstructionist - thanks to the likes of Al Gore and all the tax happy socialist liberals - go after the visible pollutants. Diesel trucks and coal burning for example. When the politicians of my state (Oregon) start to restrict, tax and outlaw things like natural gas I fight them on everything they do whether it’s right or not because I now believe them to be liars snd idiots. Lets plant trees and harvest them for building. I like those ideas. Tax carbon? Promote something do-able to the common sense public at large or fail. This post is not meant to incite any discord but rather just give an honest viewpoint.
The obsolete technologies are artificially kept alive through direct and indirect government subsidies. The only thing that stops us from reducing carbon emissions is that we don't choose to reduce carbon emissions.
Electric cars are too expensive? Just build more of them and the price will go down.
Battery storage is too expensive? Just build more and the price will go down.
Renewables are too expensive? Just build more and the price will go down.
It's a matter of choosing the new technology and right now nobody is choosing. Lots of people are proud about polluting the environment and I don't think I can change their mind, the government can't. We all know what this means: nothing can.
Without the US, China and India, these programs are all pointless.
The US, China, and India are not willing to commit.
So the rest if us might as well go home. I know its encouraging to pretend things are working. But they're not. The time for non binding commitments ended in the 90s. Now is (and has long been) the time for cold hard facts.
If it were the US OR China I might agree. But I don't think we can isolate both at the same time. Maybe with trump sabre rattling, the Chinese will get on board. Who knows
Carbon trading is when a polluting economy/state throws its weight around to keep polluting. It's that simple and that wrong.
There should be no such "credits", just emissions reduction plans - and the states which should be required to reduce the most and the fastest are those which pollute the most per capita, and the most period.
Of course, this won't happen because the largest polluters are also the most politically powerful, so they rig things in their favor.
* How to account for the unfairness in the fact that some countries got to pollute freely for a couple of centuries while others didn't get this "free pass" and are still behind in grid development.
* The question of whether absolute pollution should count more than pollution per capita or the other way around.
* The extent and the form of aid by richer/more industrially-developed economies should be committed to help with technology to poorer economies which already pollute a lot and will have difficulties adjusting independently.
Most of the governments involved in negotiating a common international agreements on carbon markets unofficially represent for-profit interests seeking advantage in the structure of the carbon market. There is an enormous amount of profit that can be realized here, and the good faith actors are in the minority. This is quite normal even in small international agreements but it becomes exponentially harder to arrive at an agreement that is minimally corrupted with respect to its nominal purpose as the profit incentive to corrupt the agreement increases. The last time I looked in on the current state of the carbon market negotiations, it had been corrupted beyond redemption. I have no faith that something useful will result.
This is why international agreements are unlikely to have a material impact on climate change. International agreements tend to only be effective when there is minimal profit or advantage to be gained by corrupting the purpose of the agreement. Climate change activities simply involve too much money for an international agreement to produce a credible outcome. It is the wrong tool for the job.