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Comment by Tomminn | Hacker News Reader

Want to make the US carbon zero? Plant and maintain a forest 5x the size of New Zealand on a cheap piece of land somewhere.

Or just start a damn carbon tax priced at the cost of offsetting the carbon. Which will turn out to be so freaking cheap, almost certainly less than ~$10/tonne. To put this in perspective, you know how air travel makes you a terrible person? Well not if you offset with a dollar of trees per hour of airtravel.

What pisses me off most about climate change is that it is stupidly easy to solve. Offsetting the 5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum the US produces would cost at most $50B per annum. And I suspect a lot less if you actually put some thought into it, or better yet, got market forces to work on it.

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>> ...or better yet, got market forces to work on it.

This is not an area where market forces can work. Market forces got us to where we are now. There will never be a healthy free market for carbon sequestration. It is an energy-negative activity. Absent artificial stimulus, it ain't going to happen.

Government is for doing what the market (ie Freedom!) cannot. This is a multi-decade problem for which open markets are ill-equipped. We need massive government intervention. This is an area where we need to take tax dollars and spend them directly on both reducing carbon output (now) and active sequestration once that becomes more efficient than further reductions.

In New Zealand, the government buys drugs from pharmeceutical companies. There is no reason why the US government cannot buy carbon offset from the free market, using the revenue generated from a carbon tax. There will be monitoring/inspection issues, to ensure the carbon is actually being sequestered, but this doesn't make it impossible.

Because carbon offset is a shell game. Paying people to not emit at X so that other people can emit at Y opens too many loopholes. The desire for profit by cutting corners and cheating will creep in. Emissions need to be directly curtailed. W don't need "if you want to burn, pay someone else to not burn." We need "thou shall not burn", or at lease "thou shall burn less tomorrow than thou didst yesterday."

It's not "pay someone else not to burn", it's "pay someone else to eat all the carbon you are spitting out". It would totally work, and it's the only way to get to zero emission.

Does I matter from where the intervention comes from?

We probably can't just do one thing and wait.

We probably have to try all the things.

This completely ignores the fact that climate change is not local problem, as well as the difficulty that has preceded all previous attempts at multilateral action.

Good luck convincing the manfucaturing lobby that they should have to pay additional carbon taxes when their foreign competitors already enjoy significantly lower regulatory costs. All that a carbon tax would acheive is carbon leakage, with production eventually being shifted abroad. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_leakage

Everyone massively overestimates the actual cost of offsetting carbon. $50B more tax per annum on the US economy is jack shit. It's like 1% of the current US federal tax. It's barely gonna affect any industry. No-one will change their ways. And yet it will get us to carbon zero.

That is just USA. Then we need to get China, India and Russia on board...

The key word is "then". That is the right word. Arguing that the US can't move first is like arguing that we can't have a proper democracy and proper human rights in the US until China, India and Russia all agree they will do the same.

Those cheap areas with no trees would need irrigation (fed by what?) and ridiculous tons of organic matter. You can’t just plant a tree in the desert and call it a day. The carbon market is a shell game and this is why.

It can be done, maybe not on literal desert but on what is currently marginal farmland. People do it on smaller scales and offset at a rate of less than $10/tonne.

"The good Earth--we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."

--Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

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