Hacker News Reader

Easy. Stop subsidizing fossil fuel exploration, extraction, and movement (ie. pipelines). Make carbon emissions expensive, and you'll see them go down.

Levy a revenue neutral carbon tax which anually redistributes to consumers the "average" tax per person.

Stop subsidizing suburban sprawl. Build more high density housing near mass transit. Walkable neighborhoods and such.

These are all obvious things we should have started decades ago.

View on HN

Transportation is only 14% [0] of greenhouse gas emission, and passenger cars are about half of that. While driving less can help, even reducing it to zero won't prevent serious climate change. So we need other solutions as well.

[0] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/My-plan-for-fighting-clima...

14% is big enough to include in a reduction scheme, no? I don't understand wanting to exclude it.

First two points (subsidy removal and carbon tax) would apply to all uses of fossil fuels, not just transportation.

I happen to agree with all of these, on some level they're even obvious, to the extent that 99%+ of all environmental economists would support it.

However, it's naive to think anything close to resembling this could happen politically IMO. That's why we aren't at all close to doing it, even though it's "obvious".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com