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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me we are truly and globally fucked:

1. There were just massive protests and riots in France (a relatively ecologically-aware country) due to an increase in the diesel tax of about 8 cents a liter meant to help wean the country off carbon. As a result of the riots, the tax was cancelled.

2. Current US administration is going 180 degrees in the other direction, i.e. doing everything it can to support coal.

3. Even if places like China and India go all out to try to reduce their reliance on carbon, their huge populations and still relatively low level of development mean that there is a tidal wave of new "carbon users" coming.

It's pretty clear to me that the short/medium term incentives to cheap energy are just much too great to counter the long(er) term impact of climate change. Major change (i.e. in the 3-4 degree range or more) appears completely inevitable to me, and we should at least start recognizing and dealing with that fact. The only thing that can possibly counter this is if the economics change drastically in favor of non-polluting sources, but given the timescale in which that would be necessary and the natural equilibrium economic forces fighting against this (e.g. if wind and solar get much cheaper, could lower demand for oil, but that would also lower price for oil - some alternative oil sources might become uneconomic but I'm certainly betting that all the carbon under Saudi Arabia is eventually going to be in the air), at best we're just extending the inevitable a little bit.

Drastic climate change is coming, and it is unavoidable. The planet (and I believe humanity) will most definitely survive, but sunken cities, mass starvation, climate-change induced wars, stronger and more powerful storms and fires are coming, and at this point there isn't much we can do to stop it.

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Protesters are not protesting just the taxes on fuel.

They protest the fact that taxing fuel is not the solution if you don't provide an alternative mode of transport.

Some people live far from the cities, Should they be the ones paying for everybody else and let the people living in the cities without a car not pay their fair share of the burden?

The problem with taxing the diesel is that you are telling people that they are criminals and should stop polluting, but at the same time, airline companies, and freight transporters don't pay the same taxes.

Rich/urban people don't care, they just rent an Uber or get a Lime and I guess that's ok, but lately, it seems that the only ones paying the price of carbon are the lower and middle classes.

Surely, you can understand that people are tired of paying when they can't even feed their families properly?

Should I remind you that there are 9 million people living close or below the poverty line in France? And half of those people are actually working or looking for work but can't find any, yet the government is asking those people with the least amount of disposable income to foot the bill for the entire country.

Sounds like a shitty deal to me.

I understand your argument, but the people living in rural areas are bigger contributors to pollution since they tend to drive more and live in single family dwellings. Why shouldn’t the actual road users pay the cost of using the road? I agree any industry using fuel should pay an equal tax though.

The people in the cities benefit from the things the rural people produce (i.e.food). Why shouldn't they shoulder the cost of at least some of the the externalities also?

They do when they pay for the food.

Usually this would be accomplished by farmers passing on higher food prices on to the supermarkets and the consumer.

Unfortunately this doesn't work in a globalized race to the bottom. People can go buy a cheaper item that was shipped around the world 3 times before landing on supermarket shelves.

That is a completely separate problem. If country X can produce food cheaper than yours, your farmers will be unprofitable and you'll end up importing food (or subsidizing local food somehow). If both countries impose a carbon tax in the same amount, nothing about that has changed.

Moreover, the best way to do a carbon tax is to just give the money back to people -- use it to fund a UBI. Then the amount can be as high as you want because the higher you make the tax, the more progressive it is, because it increases the amount of the UBI. Let corporations pay more for diesel with the money going to individuals. Paying $900/month in additional fuel tax to get $1000/month in UBI would be great for the poor. Not so much for the oil companies.

No, you've got comparative advantage crucially wrong. If country X can produce food a bit cheaper/better than you, but produces shoes much cheaper/better, then you end up growing at least some of your own food and importing shoes from X. https://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/Details/comparativead...

Comparative advantage has nothing to do with it. The market price of a global commodity has the opportunity costs already priced in. It's the reason more prosperous countries have higher labor costs.

If you and some other country are producing food for the same cost (e.g. because you pay more for an hour of labor but have better automation), adding the same cost to each doesn't affect your competitiveness. You both still have the same costs as each other.

The same amount of fuel tax only affects you differently if you require a different amount of fuel to produce the same amount of food. Then the party using less fuel has the advantage and may end up producing more food while the party using more fuel produces less. But that's what we want to happen -- having the other country produce food in that case is the desired outcome, because it can do it for lower cost once the externalities of burning carbon are priced in.

That does not work because most of the food transportation is by ship freight and truck, which have enough range to evade your tax.

And the local transport costs are identical between local and export farmer, while local production is more expensive on labor and fuel.

The only thing to do is to raise duties on food and... it is risky politically. Alternatively, subsidize much more. Good luck!

> That does not work because most of the food transportation is by ship freight and truck, which have enough range to evade your tax.

Solution: If the carbon tax for the product's production and transportation is not collected by the country of origin, it is collected by customs on import.

> And the local transport costs are identical between local and export farmer, while local production is more expensive on labor and fuel.

If it's more expensive on labor, it was the whole time. If it uses more fuel, discouraging it is the intended outcome.

> If country X can produce food cheaper than yours, your farmers will be unprofitable and you'll end up importing food

It really depends on where the tipping point is, country X might have a slight advantage but measures like this can widen the gap, then secondary factors like economies of scale kick in.

> If both countries impose a carbon tax in the same amount, nothing about that has changed.

Most international agreements are (rightfully) trying to give developing countries a reprieve and let the developed ones shoulder must of the short term burden for the renewable transition. But it's happening at the same time that we're reducing tariffs and developing countries get a double advantage while the working class in developed nations get a kick in the guts.

> Moreover, the best way to do a carbon tax is to just give the money back to people -- use it to fund a UBI

I'm all for both, but using a carbon tax to fund UBI would invert the incentive, governments would want companies polluting more to fund their welfare commitments. We see the same with high cigarette taxes, the government gets dependent on them for general revenue.

> It really depends on where the tipping point is, country X might have a slight advantage but measures like this can widen the gap, then secondary factors like economies of scale kick in.

For most markets with behaviors like that you're already doomed, because the other country will figure it out and borrow some money so they can operate temporarily at a loss or convince the government to provide temporary subsidies until they achieve the economies of scale. More likely a marginal cost increase would only result in a marginal reduction in demand.

Notice also that this is the exact argument used against anything that increases costs on local businesses. France might have some candidate regulations nearer to the front of the line than the carbon tax if they were actually interested in taking that seriously.

> Most international agreements are (rightfully) trying to give developing countries a reprieve and let the developed ones shoulder must of the short term burden for the renewable transition.

But then it's doing what it's supposed to do. Why volunteer for a burden and then complain when it comes?

> But it's happening at the same time that we're reducing tariffs and developing countries get a double advantage while the working class in developed nations get a kick in the guts.

Which is why all the money should be going to a UBI.

> I'm all for both, but using a carbon tax to fund UBI would invert the incentive, governments would want companies polluting more to fund their welfare commitments. We see the same with high cigarette taxes, the government gets dependent on them for general revenue.

This is a generic anti-tax argument. If the government collected tax revenues from American tech companies, they would become dependent on the money and become unwilling to resist their privacy invasions, therefore they should subject all those companies to no taxes.

The thing about that argument in this case is that it only applies as long as the carbon tax exists, which will make it continue to exist, which is good. Moreover, the easiest way for the government to placate recipients and give them more money isn't to get people to burn more oil (which is pretty hard if you're taxing it heavily), it's to raise the carbon tax rate. Which is also good.

At some point people will actually stop burning oil and the UBI would have to be funded some other way if you want to keep it, but so what? Having that problem implies having solved the original one. And having a population that has seen the benefits of a UBI and wants to continue having it seems like a pretty good problem to have too.

The thing is, nobody can afford a reasonable UBI. US even if they'd put all the military spending into it would do about $200 per month and person. Without a lot of social services, this does not work.

Poland cannot afford 200 PLN (about $60) if we put the whole budget into this which is impossible. It gets strained even with child bonus...

Those are back off the envelope calculations and an unfixable problem.

If you introduce a cutoff it's no longer universal and you still probably cannot afford it.

A UBI doesn't work like a normal spending program, because it's cash. If you're at the median and to fund the $1000/person UBI you have to pay an additional $1000 in tax, you aren't paying $1000 more, you're net of zero. The above-median person who pays $1200 in tax isn't paying $1200, they're paying $200. The below-median person who pays $800 in tax isn't paying $800, they're receiving $200.

This is also why a cut off saves you nothing. If the person at the 85th percentile would have been paying $2000 in tax and receiving a $1000 UBI, and you eliminate their UBI so that they only pay $1000 in tax, zero real difference has been made to anyone. A phase out only changes anything if the nominal tax reduction it allows goes to a different income level than the people subject to the phase out -- but if that's what you wanted, you could do it by just changing their respective tax rates to begin with. Which is a lot easier to reason about, so that you don't do dumb stuff like impose a 35% UBI phase out plus a 25% marginal tax rate (effectively a 60% marginal tax rate) on middle income people, while charging a lower tax rate to higher income people.

More to the point, the context here is using a carbon tax to fund the UBI, which makes the point succinctly. If the average person is paying $100/month in carbon tax, it funds a $100/person/month UBI. A carbon tax is quite regressive -- more even than sales tax -- but the UBI is at least as anti-regressive, so it cancels. The only difference it makes is to the people with a higher or lower than average carbon footprint, so it gives everyone the incentive to be on the below average side, which is exactly the purpose.

> People can go buy a cheaper item that was shipped around the world 3 times before landing on supermarket shelves.

This is a very good argument for higher carbon taxes -- they would make the shipped item more expensive.

And if transported goods are much cheaper than locally produced even after paying a transportation cost including taxes, then maybe it's time for some producers to try something else. Or to convince the government that there's a value in producing food in that specific area and get more subsidies.

Is that what prices are for?

Some people have no choice but to live in the countryside.

I don't live in France anymore but in the village that I used to live in which was 40km from Paris, the rent for a decent size apartment i.e, not a broom closet was around 700 euros per month.

Many people in France make less than 1800 euros per month.

Which means that in the best case scenario they are left with 1k euro before any basic necessities such as food, electricity, water insurance, phone bill and what not.

The result is that the end of the month they got nothing or barely anything.

So what do people do, they move further away so they can save a few hundred euros in rent, even if that means paying more for fuel because they just want to live a little not just survive!

And guess what, there is a reason that the rent is lower further away from Paris. The reason is that there are no trains, very little buses, so where does that leave those people, they are stuck!

Yet the government comes around and says, you guys are polluting? Well Fk me, what do you want those people to do about it, they just want to survive!

Do you think people are actually waking up in the morning and saying: "Today I am going to spend 60euros to fill up my tank and I am just going to drive in circles for hours to screw up the climate!"

The governments have known about climate change for DECADES, now that it's actually threatening the economies of the world, they decided to react by making people pay their own lack of foresight?

As always, the little guy is getting shafted while the biggest polluters in this world, the freighters, and the airline companies are spared. And for what?

Isn't this all the point though? People live further out and travel more because it's cheaper. The goal is to change behaviour by making more polluting choices less cheap.

If the problem is the poorest, why not use the fuel duty raised to help them? They're surely not using all the fuel, so this could be a net benefit to them.

> Isn't this all the point though? People live further out and travel more because it's cheaper. The goal is to change behaviour by making more polluting choices less cheap.

The problem I have is that those incentives are driving people to kill themselves as they cannot afford to live anymore. I guess that's what the government wants though, less pollution.

Can't pollute if your dead.

This is massively cynical but I do see your point. I think a more viable solution is probably for the government to build low cost high rise public housing (NOT targeted at the homeless) near major cities, to reduce transportation word.

Housing is energetically expensive to build... the balance sheet is not favorable for the energy investment.

Better yet to build electric vehicle infrastructure (trains, trams, charging stations - cheap compared to housing) which could also be used by some business, tax non-train freight. Replace buses with electric ones.

Farming cannot be done in the middle of the city and you probably do not want factories there either... Your move would likely kill the remaining parts of this business if successful.

> The problem I have is that those incentives are driving people to kill themselves as they cannot afford to live anymore.

Which is why I added the other paragraph.

People have to live far outside of the city because housing costs are too high in the city. How does it possibly make sense to make gas cheaper rather than adopting policies that create more housing so that more people can afford to live in the city?

If rents go down, the poor get to pay less to landlords. If gas prices go down, the poor have to pay more to oil companies (because it "allows" them to live further away) and spend more of their lives commuting. Which policy actually helps the poor, which one helps the oil companies?

I think you're confusing rural areas and suburban areas.

It's the suburban wastelands that are saturated with families of daily-driven automobiles and commuters.

I live in a rural area, most of my neighbors only drive to a grocery store ~10 miles away once a week. The rest of the time is spent at home.

Then on the weekends a bunch of city folks blast through disrupting everything on their way to/from Las Vegas and/or to hike in the national park. It's absolutely nuts, the small town becomes a microcosm of LA via weekend tourism, every weekend.

The rural folks I know are mostly poor, they can't afford to be burning fossil fuels like it's going out of style. They live relatively frugal lives, they're not the problem.

I live in a rural area, I love it when I go days at a time without leaving. I'm very strategic about my trips into town, and with few exceptions won't leave unless I have a minimum of two things I need to do. I definitely did WAY more driving when I lived in the city and the burbs, but out here it's just so inconvenient/time consuming to run into town that I avoid it at all costs.

"Should they be the ones paying for everybody else and let the people living in the cities without a car not pay their fair share of the burden?"

A carbon tax, which taxes carbon, taxes the people who use carbon less, does not sound like users aren't paying "their fair share". They ARE paying their fair share, because they use less.

The problem of use-based taxes affecting the poor disproportionately is well-known, but a use-based tax is the most effective at causing user behavior change. The point of the tax isn't the revenue, the point is to make stuff cost more.

The reason that people in cities won't pay the tax is that they have buses and trains available.

That is not available to the people from the countryside.

You can't just say stop polluting but not give any alternative mode of transport for this people.

What about the rest of the people of this the planet who don't live in a city? Should they just shut up and take it?

Easy to say when you are not the one who has to pay.

The NIMBY syndrome in all its splendor.

You can't just say stop polluting but not give any alternative mode of transport for this people.

Part of the reason they don't have alternative modes of transport is because driving is so (artificially) cheap that other modes have a hard time getting off the ground & staying operational.

Yes, I know it's chicken & egg.

People in cities pay higher costs for housing and sacrifice space, comfort and privacy for the amenities of city life. They also suffer the most from localized pollution.

The entire point of the tax is to incentivize people to use less fuel. How they accomplish that is their own prerogative. They can move, travel less, buy a more fuel efficient vehicle, look to increase their earning, or any of a number of alternatives not listed here.

This is precisely why usage taxes are so effective. Rather than prescribing a solution to a problem, you let people figure out the best way to minimize how much they are effected.

Consider a road. As use of it increases, repairs to it are costing more and more. In response to that, the government puts a use tax on it, to pay for the repairs.

In response, all the people who need to drive on it to get to work get outraged. Why don't we charge the people who don't drive on it???!? It's unfair that we have to pay for it just because we use it!

Hopefully you can see how that's ridiculous. And that directly parallels the carbon tax.

The solution is to encourage behavior patterns that generate less carbon. That can mean moving to cities. It can also mean localities providing more public transit. Or labor negotiating more telecommuting options.

A nice, non-distortionary way to deal with the problem is to take the tax, and either reduce other taxes equivalently (for every euro the carbon tax pulls in, reduce the VAT by one euro) or to just hand out the total proceeds of the carbon tax to everyone directly. The disincentive to pollute remains, so you still end up with a fairer economic system.

It's not even a tax on cars. It's a tax on fuel for cars. They could: Drive less. Just go other places less. Increase fuel efficiency, such as with a smaller vehicle. Switch to a hybrid or electric car.

These are all choices that otherwise, they would not make, because it's cheap enough and easy enough to run a diesel car that alternatives aren't important. The point of a carbon tax is to change that equation, such that people start looking for alternatives.

The way to make fuel taxes palatable is to have corresponding tax reductions in other taxes that hit the poor, such as the VAT.

How is a tax on a bad behavior akin to calling someone a criminal? Their choice to have a diesel car and live where they did means they are poisoning the atmosphere for the rest of us. That's a negative externality to their behavior that is not being accounted for. Should they get to pollute the air for free? If we're so worried about the poor, why not levy new taxes on the rich with super yachts and palatial estates? Why not use a revenue-neutral carbon tax with a progressive rebate of some kind. Let's not destroy our atmosphere to support poor polluting individuals. Let's protect our atmosphere and reward poor individuals whose choices are better for our planet, biosphere, and the future wars and devastation bad behaviors like this will surely lead to.

> 2. Current US administration is going 180 degrees in the other direction, i.e. doing everything it can to support coal.

And apparently failing miserably in this effort:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/oct/17/epa-cheers-...

I think this article helps me clarify a great point, mainly in these sentences: "The yearslong decline in U.S. emissions has been widely credited to the oil and gas boom. Power plants increasingly turned from coal to natural gas as innovations in extraction technology resulted in lower prices."

Lots of people talk about carbon emission reductions, but there is a much simpler way to think about it. There is a lot of carbon stored in the ground in the form of coal, natural gas and oil. What's the probability that a great deal of that carbon will be left there, permanently? The only way this will happen is if the production costs of non-emitting forms of energy (mainly solar, wind and nuclear) are fundamentally less than the extraction costs of the carbon forms in the ground. That may be possible for some high-cost carbon sources like coal, but the cost of production of some traditional oil sources (like Ghawar field) are ridiculously cheap, and tech like fracking has made other carbon sources like natural gas also cheaper.

Thus, the idea that reducing the production cost of natural gas is good for the environment is ridiculous. At the end of the day you've made another huge carbon source that much cheaper to extract. It may temporarily switch from some more polluting source, but at the end of the day all of that (now cheaper) gas is coming out of the ground and going into the air.

So instead of looking at emission rates, we should be asking "What is the probability that non-carbon-emitting forms of energy will eventually be made cheaper than carbon-emitting forms of energy". If you do the math on this one, even leaving a lot of uncertainty that tech on one side or the other will change the equation a bit, the only conclusion you can come to is that there are still huge amounts of carbon to be released. We're inevitably fucked.

So instead of looking at emission rates...

Lowering the emission rates does buy us time to tackle the problem. It's hard to solve something right away & all in one go. But if you can put our friend Zeno to work, you might have a chance.

If gas reserves are exploited along with coal reserves, your conjecture holds. If gas reserves are exploited in lieu of coal reserves, it does not.

If the cost per Joule of carbon-free energy goes down over time, carbon-free energy will eventually dominate the energy economy. This is generally expected to happen "too late" because of how much carbon will be released before we get there.

If burning oil and gas instead of coal reduces carbon emissions prior to carbon-free sources taking over, overall carbon emissions are reduced and the amount of warming is reduced.

> If gas reserves are exploited along with coal reserves, your conjecture holds. If gas reserves are exploited in lieu of coal reserves, it does not.

If we exploit all the fossil fuel resources, in currently operating mines and wells, we will blow through the 2 C 'safe' warming budget.

Unless for every new fracking well, we shut down a coal mine, the conjecture absolutely holds.

That's exactly what the parent is saying. We're not shutting down coal mines - they're just being made noncompetitive but in the long run that amounts to the same thing.

Opening new coal mines may be uncompetitive. Nobody's stopping work in existing ones.

It does not amount to the same thing. To avoid catastrophic warming, we need to stop all development of new fossil fuel resources, and stop exploitation of some active fossil fuel resources.

We're not doing that. We're not even close to doing that.

It is unlikely that countries with oil and gas will leave it in the ground. However, quite a bit of the coal is in countries that are prosperous and which should be able to muster the political will to leave the coal in the ground. That would be a great improvement.

It's not just China and India. It's nations in Africa that are prime for (re)industrialization.

Keep an especially close eye on African countries in which China has made infrastructure investments. Those roads, railways, and ports will be pumping raw resources in the near future, but I'd be willing to bet that eventually export of finished goods will be a major component as China's labor force demands more higher wages.

At that point Africa's carbon emissions graph will start to look very familiar.

The protests in france are a little more nuanced than a simple reaction to a new gas tax. They are in the context of a larger budget debate. There is an air in all western countries that the highest earners aren't being treated fairly. New policies that favor the rich have become a norm. The people of france are rebelling against that trend, as they have done dozens of times in France's past.

The graph in this story is the heart of the matter. Look at who benefits most from the latest changes to France's budget. The disposable incomes of the vast magority of people are unchanged (+/- 1%) with a massive benefit to the very wealthy. In that context, fuel taxes become a far bigger deal.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46437904

Also, a reform of the school system means that fewer students will be going to college, so the students are out protesting that too.

Really these protests are an amalgamation of various groups that have almost nothing in common with each other other than being upset with the current government. And some of the goals are even opposing... presumably those students want something done about climate change, but they've joined pro-global-warming protests and are about to throw out a government trying to do something about climate change, just because they're upset about college.

They're probably correct that taxes should be going up on the wealthy. And it's also probably correct that taxing energy consumption is the wrong approach to take when you have industrial mega-polluters that can individually put out more carbon than whole countries. Maersk going carbon-neutral is the best climate news I've heard in a long time.

On the other hand, it's easy for the young to demand in front of the UN that something be done about climate change... it's harder when the changes you demand begin to impact you personally (says a person who has felt no real impact himself).

I also would not underestimate the significance of the yellow jackets. They symbolize many things beyond the gas tax paid by drivers. They are a thing that the government says you have to carry in your car. They are a thing that can be inspected by a cop that pulls you over. They are also the symbol of someone who actually drives a car. Driving a car is where people are most policed by their governments (see all traffic laws). Anyone who has ever been pulled over by a cop, or saddled with a massive parking ticket, understands what it means to be a driver as opposed to someone like a politician who is driven.

(One of the big dislikes of Hillary Clinton is/was her admission that it had she hadn't driven a vehicle in decades. That means something to everyone on the political spectrum.)

Nuanced or not is pretty irrelevant. At the end of the day there is extremely little tolerance for making carbon sources of energy more expensive. It's certainly not just France - in the US the gas tax was last raised 25 years ago, it is not indexed to inflation, and there is 0 substantive political discussion about raising that tax in the US.

also, the riots in france (and other european nations aswell by now) is mostly about the fact that the economy is doing great, but wages and funding of the social safety net have not been increased.

People are mainly angry because after a decade of austerity, they are not getting the spoils of a good economy.

I'm reminded of Stein's Law. It is not exactly right, but it is how I feel this will likely play out. At least if reduction in carbon emissions is the only card we have in our hand. I.e. we will stop emitting carbon when (for all practical purposes) we run out. Not before.

At some point I do expect people will start having more serious discussions about how much climate engineering we are willing to undertake. Certainly the upper atmosphere sulfur dioxide injection has some plausible utility, in addition to being short-lived should it prove counterproductive. Collectively, humans seem to have more appetite for engineering our way out of problems than conserving.

Option two, we can stop emitting when it becomes obsolete. That means two unforeseen technical miracles could save us, as opposed to just the one of climate engineering that works. I bet it would be a lot easier to organize a "moon landing" program for fusion or something like it than it would be to talk the entire world into reducing economic activity.

Actually, I think this is a great point. I think the only thing that will keep us from being "truly and globally fucked" is if we develop economical fusion power in the next 30 years or so.

It looks to be a self-correcting problem. Eventually the side-effect of burning hydrocarbons will kill off the creatures who insist on burning hydrocarbons.

No, it kills off creatures who burn relatively little hydrocarbons per capita because they lack the resources to adapt, while the largest consumers of hydrocarbons survive because they can afford to adapt.

For France it's better to delay judgement, it's a messy protest movement. I despised it at first because why "defend cars" but these people don't care about cars or fossil fuels. It's just that they have no other way to find and go to a job.

ps: no other way as in other modes of transportation worsen badly, they did use train but it's too unreliable and a lot more expensive than a few years ago. This is the kind of things that made them go crazy.

We will all have no way to find a job when the planet is destroyed.

Planet ain't going anywhere. Only us.

> It seems to me we are truly and globally fucked

Yep. I'd say that's clear. My only consolation will be all those "told you so" opportunities. And I have moved north, uphill, and into a region of small farms. So hey.

Maybe it's aliens who are using humanity to "terraform" Earth into a climate that's more favorable to them. That makes about as much sense as anything else.

Who exactly is behind this yellow jacket stuff, though? How about everybody else goes on the streets? We're talking about the survival of hundreds of millions of people, even billions of people, and a few thousand people engaging in vandalism make gas tax increase not an option, just like that?

Why do we so easily accept mass starvation and wars in the future, but not harsh laws now? And no, I don't mean tax the middle class and the poor, by all means tax private jets to hell, too. But don't "non-tax" our future to hell and just shrug it off.

> Current US administration is going 180 degrees in the other direction

So fight it. It's not like everybody started "grabbing women by the pussy" just because Trump was elected, how could you care what he and his interest groups want when it comes to something even more important? Is that's what anyone wants to tell their children, that there was this guy, and so nobody could do anything?

> Even if places like China and India go all out to try to reduce their reliance on carbon, their huge populations and still relatively low level of development mean that there is a tidal wave of new "carbon users" coming.

Okay, that's but that's then, and there. Saying "we can't do anything" just excuses everybody not doing anything, and it worsens the example we set, to boot. How about we do something out of principle, for once, because it's the right thing to do? Even if it's "inevitable" as you say, it's not like we're not doing other things, who knows what inventions or discoveries we can still make - so every year we buy, is better.

We are the generations with the least excuses. We know more than those before us, we can be certain it's happening, and we have more options than those after us. Our lack of using those options will further restrict their options.

First we did nothing (serious) because it wasn't clear if it would so bad, it was "controversial". Then suddenly it jumps over to "inevitable". There is the middle part that's missing, where people act, and don't excuse their present inactions with predictions how it would not matter if they acted, knowing full well they will never have to face the people they condemned, or how their predictions turned out, what could have happened if they had chosen differently.

More than. 70% of French citizens sympathize with the yellow jackets, so no one is really gonna go out and oppose them. Unfortunately I think that unless you have a completely authoritarian government, it will be hard to convince your citizens to accept short term loss for long term benefits such as preserving the environment.

Reducing carbon emissions sounds good until you consider that you could actually just save up some money, move somewhere away from the shore, and live out the rest of your life.

What incentives are the carbon-reducing crowds providing for the common man? Are they going to finally get it together and build affordable housing in our coastal cities? Are they going to let us park electric vehicles or do we have to ride the bike? Can we still use cash or does every business have to be cash free? Are they going to assure that my water is safe to drink or just ban plastic water bottles and let me die? Can we be responsible for our own safety or do we have to live in a police state?

There is there no semblance of choice on the opposing side. It's all or nothing "REDUCE WASTEFUL BEHAVIORS NOW" (but look the other way as we allow business to do whatever they like). Who would ever submit to that? I'd rather plan my contingency now than become a slave to whatever future the bureaucrats decide for us.

you seem to vastly underestimate how impossible "moving somewhere away from the shore" would be for the majority of the world's population.

For instance, my country would be over 50% flooded with a 2 meter searise.

also, countries like bangladesh are truely screwed, and it has a population of 150 million people!

not to mention that climate change would make our global economy collapse and high yield argriculture impossible.

Bangladesh's problem isn't that it's so close to sea level it's that it's poor. California's problem isn't that droughts make forest fires it's that they're aren't quite so rich that they can live in the middle of a tinderbox.

An entire country being wiped out from sea level rise is a problem that is pretty specific to Bangladesh. It only takes 9m of sea level rise to flood more than 70% of Bangladesh.

If you need to provide incentives for doing the right thing it suggests that you haven't won the argument yet about what the right thing is.

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