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Comment by douglaswlance | Hacker News Reader

Ok. The Earth is warming and all this bad stuff will happen. Why is government the solution? The USA withdrew from the Paris Accord and also had the biggest diminishment of greenhouse gas emissions in 2017 of all Accord members. We did so by market forces which push for efficiency.

The way to solve global warming is to support market forces pushing for efficiency, not government force that supports inefficiency.

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The current market doesn't price the externalities of carbon emissions. Without accurate pricing, market forces will stall some distance away from the optimal level of emissions, and we'll be worse off. Governments are the only entities powerful enough to solve such a widely-distributed coordination problem, and properly-functioning markets are contingent on properly-functioning governments.

Individuals don't care about efficiency, they care about price. This is partially why the government had to step in to create labor laws. Unless they're directly impacted by it right now, the average consumer does not care. The American meat industry is downright terrible in some cases, and people are buying more meat than ever.

If you halved the price of the iPhone by introducing slave labor in some faraway land, you would still sell a boatload of iPhones.

This is one of the ways that I believe government should intervene because individuals are very bad at deciding based on long-term impacts.

Individuals do care about efficiency, because they care about paying less in their electric bill.

How did the USA lower emissions the most in 2017 while also withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord? Because efficiency is increasing across the board and people are buying more efficient devices.

If you produced lab-grown meat that was undistinguishable and utilized energy more efficiently, then it would be less expensive and people would buy it.

Individuals only care about efficiency if it impacts price.

There are numerous examples of people paying more for things in the long term because they're less expensive immediately. Entire industries are built on this. Again, humans aren't particularly good at forecasting long-term decisions.

Additionally, The VAST majority of emission decrease in the past 10 years in the US has been due to moving from coal to shale gas, not because of individual purchasing decisions. It's iterative movement that was caused by a combination of market forces and government regulations, not one or the other on its own (and the current administration is actually reversing many regulations that promoted shale gas over coal).

Renewables still don't even touch the impacts of moving from coal to shale gas.

So a global, high carbon dioxide tax would be a perfect way to solve this, you say? That’d give markets incentive to do their thing.

It'd be impossible to implement and verify. Countries would cheat.

It'd be better to take all associated costs with implementing and verifying such a scheme, and give them out as grants to entrepreneurs creating electric vehicles, clean energy, greenhouse-neutral farming, etc.

Part of the reason for the decrease is the increase in renewable energy. The vast majority of renewable energy technologies are or were supported by government subsidies to jump-start the industry. Most of those are tapering over the next decade or so, but the government (federal, state, and local) was instrumental in getting the renewable energy industry started in the USA.

Taking one example of a specific accord and saying, "because we didn't need this government [thing], we don't need any government [thing]," is a faulty generalization. Truth is, we need the government and the markets and several other things that work together in an extremely complex way (that no single human can understand fully) to solve global climate change.

Government subsidies (and grants) support market forces.

No, they don't. The government subsidies promised to soy bean farmers in the mid west are a direct result of the market moving away from them as tariffs from China make the US soybean market less affordable.

Government subsidies are typically meant to prop up industries against market forces.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

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