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@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @cjd @dazinism Right. You tax the carbon at the point it enters the market, whether by being imported or pumped from the ground. The underlying assumption is that all carbon eventually becomes CO2.
Some can become methane, which lasts long enough and has a potent enough effect to be worth taxing or regulating as a pollutant in its own right. But there are far fewer methane sources than CO2.
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@dazinism @cjd @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr One could have a tax credit for sequestration, but deciding what should count as sequestration will probably be challenging.
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@freakazoid @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @dazinism
One problem with climate change is there's really no incentive to deal with it. If a democratic state starts to tax carbon, as soon as it begins to actually harm the economy people will vote that government out of power. Clean air is different because people in the cities directly feel the pain, climate change is always Someone Else's Problem.
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@cjd @freakazoid @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @dazinism
Today in absolute condemnations of capitalism: " One problem with climate change is there's really no incentive to deal with it." This may be a hint.
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@zeh
I don't care what kind of economic system you have, when people start to have difficulty putting food on the table, they're going to vote you out, and quality of life is unfortunately highly correlated with energy consumption.
@freakazoid @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @dazinism
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@cjd
That makes no sense. You're mistaking your experience for what is possible, when the first is a tiny subset of the second. Voting inside "economic systems" that constrict your options to what is profitable is a travesty of freedom and there could be as many ways to live well as there are people, correlated to energy spending or not.
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@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism Interestingly enough, this seems to be something that entrepreneurship is fairly good at. I'm sure there are other ways to accomplish it, and entrepreneurship (at least when funded by intellectual property) is obviously bad at certain kinds of invention, like certain types of drugs and medical treatments, but nonprofit foundations seem to do the best job there, not government grants.
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@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism Tesla is an interesting example. Elon Musk has as much money as he does because of the factors I mentioned, but Tesla itself is in many ways a charity; VCs and angels would never have financed such an endeavor out of a profit motive. It's going to take a very long time to even come close to paying Musk back, much less making him more money than he's put in.
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@dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr And the current pattern of bringing new technologies to "early adopters", who tend to be wealthy, first means that those early adopters are the ones paying for the research. One can imagine ways to accelerate this process, but most new products that aren't just minor iterations on old ones end up failing, so most of the time you'd just make failure more costly in total.
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@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism Making failure more costly is bad, because the process of invention is mostly a random search, so failure should be fast, cheap, and plentiful.
This is a major problem with the current way the markets are allocating capital. Uber has essentially been treated as if the investors are certain it will succeed if only it gets enough money and grows large enough.
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@dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr In a way this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because that money is getting spent on lobbying and driving competition out of the market. But it's also extremely costly, because to make an above-market return on their investment, the investors are betting on the irrational exuberance of the public after it IPOs.
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@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism IOW, their plan is to build this thing that looks like the "next Facebook" and dump it on the public. And the public will suck it up because with enough VC money almost any idea can be made to look good.
So raise interest rates, shift more money into debt financing which requires actual profits, and actual savings accounts (or treasuries and CDs), and make companies grow more slowly and fail more quickly.
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@dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr (Those latter things were consequences of raising interest rates, not additional actions that need to be taken.)
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@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism Addressing the other points in your post, while it's true that we know the technology works, the problem is that we also know there are a bunch of alternative technologies that are likely to be even better, so going "all in" now has a decent chance of producing a worse outcome (possibly much worse) than an approach that puts the decisionmaking and risk in the same (preferably distributed) hands.
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@dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr In my view the best approach by far is to push *away* from the thing we know for sure is bad and let people decide on their own what they think the best alternative is. The best way to do that is with a carbon tax.
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@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism I agree that battery powered cars appear to be the best choice, for cars. What we don't know is what kind of battery or charging system is best. If we picked CCS chargers and lithium ion technology, we'd be stuck with a system where charging takes at least 10x as long as fueling. Long lines at charging stations, etc.
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@dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr Investing in alternatives to cars is exactly what the government should be doing. It can use a carbon tax to partially fund this if it wants, but IMO the carbon tax should be considered independently of any redistribution. If the carbon tax is a good idea, we should implement it. If subisidization of mass transit is a good idea, we should do that. Doesn't matter where the money goes from the first or comes from for the second.
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@freakazoid @dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl@niu.moe @bhtooefr imho strikes me as odd. What people are able to do is pretty much inherently tied to what they can afford in our society.
Where people live depends on how much money people make. Seems even more involved with peoples lives. Infact so much so that people might be forced to drive cars if other modes of transport are unsuitable to the area.
That's a reality for some, other than dealing with it, don't think cars are a "right".
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@jasper @bhtooefr @cjd @dazinism
I totally agree with you that it's not great for someone to be able to choose to do something that's harmful to the planet just because they're rich. But at the same time, why do we ignore that they're also doing something (paying the carbon tax) that we have decided as a society is good?
I...
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@dazinism @cjd @bhtooefr @jasper Whoops the "I" before the ellipsis was me failing to delete all the text I meant to move into this post.
I guess we can make absolutely certain the harm is fully offset by just banning fossil fuels entirely, but that would cause substantially more chaos in the short term than even a fairly steep carbon tax, and it would be just as regressive in its effect.
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@freakazoid @dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl@niu.moe @bhtooefr incidentally a right wing nutty politician in the netherlands actually said ... flying vacations are a right...
I think cars and flying across the world for vacations are basically luxuries we can't really afford.
I mean.. it's not absolute at all, like some areas with lower population densities and some cases like illness, or people moving homes. I mean to deal with shit..