Comment by hbt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hbt | Hacker News Reader

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I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought this.

No one has a solution for climate change that doesn't involve changing personal habits. People don't want to do that. Eating less meat or a carbon tax (i.e taxing the working poor) is not a solution. It's admitting defeat.

People don't need to "believe in climate change". We simply need to build a solution that is much better than what they have available now. What that solution is? Plenty of ideas, no one has a clue how to execute them.

The current strategy for the left is: let's see how guilty we can make people feel about their consumption habits and scare them with far distant consequences. Talk about funding "green"/eco-friendly businesses which barely make a difference and try to sell people on carbon tax.

For the right, the strategy is: deny, deny, deny. Double down on economic growth and hope innovation follows.

Of course, "hope and dreams" sells. Admitting defeat wouldn't get you elected. The rhetoric is adjusted accordingly.

Wind is almost 5% of US electric production.

Solar is finally ready to make a difference (look at the last 5 years of the table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_Stat... ).

Adding 0.3% of generation each year isn't fast enough, but it's ridiculous to say that no one knows how to execute a move towards clean electricity and that it can barely make a difference.

And batteries are almost there as far as being affordable storage.

> Eating less meat or a carbon tax (i.e taxing the working poor) is not a solution.

As for taxing the poor, that's fixable: the legislation should have all revenues from a carbon tax returned as per-capita "rebates" (I'd think of it as a Basic Income paid for by polluters).

>Eating less meat or a carbon tax (i.e taxing the working poor) is not a solution.

The poor emit disproportionately little CO2. A carbon tax mostly taxes industry.

What about China?

They're not poor. Across large parts of their land area, they're an industrialized country now. They have a middle class as large as the entire United States population. That said: most Chinese don't own cars, or eat meat with every meal, or live in 2000 ft^2 fully heated McMansions in cold terrain. In short, most of them live more ecologically efficient lifestyles by default.

Oh, and they instituted population control decades ago.

Nowadays, a poor country is probably somewhere in Africa or Southeast Asia. Not much of the world is "starving children everywhere" poor anymore.

> A carbon tax mostly taxes industry.

And the poor never purchase anything that was made by using industry, so they certainly wouldn't have the costs passed on to them or anything.

Thus the poor will change what they buy. Substitution works.

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