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Comment by jlev | Hacker News Reader

And we only have a decade left to save the planet. Time to stop extracting fossil fuels and emitting ancient carbon into the atmosphere.

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... And go back to the stone ages.

Fundamentally, there's nothing wrong with burning oil. There are certain applications where it will continue to be the best energy choice.

More important is (a) taxing oil consumption to offset the negative environmental effects & (b) transitioning away from oil where it makes sense.

We only have 12 years, at least that's what I've been told to believe.

>More important is (a) taxing oil consumption to offset the negative environmental effects

And do what with the money raised with those taxes? I don't trust the people in charge to do what's needed to be done. The only positive thing from taxing oil consumption, would be to make it so expensive that people seek alternatives. When US gas prices were near $5/gallon, people sold their gas guzzlers and switched to fuel efficient choices. Once gas went back down, cars were sold off and guzzlers became the choice again. If Americans paid the similar prices to EU prices, things would be a lot different.

Transfer the money directly into public transit. Or construction of renewable energy. Or towards education or health care.

I mean you can just put it in the general fund as a way of discouraging use, like you said. I think that would work just fine.

If you can convince politicians to make the tax, it's trivial in comparison to earmark all the money for carbon capture and carbon capture research. (And it won't matter if existing funding gets cancelled because the influx would be a thousand times bigger.)

What? Are you fking serious? We have to invest tens of trillions in scalable carbon sequestration right now or there's no future for anyone except to starve or be part of another world war.

Usually, Pigouvian taxes like the one OP was proposing are calculated to cover the complete externalized costs of the item being taxed. So in this case, it would include the costs of adjusting to climate change. This would make alternatives relatively cheaper, as well as raising revenue to support research and construction of new energy infrastructure, as well as point addressing of specific projects identified to reduce the impacts of climate change. Of course, this is all if you believe that the current political climate (not only in the US, but in large middle income economies as well) can support such taxes. And then you have to decide what the tax should be! Ultimately, cap and trade turn out to be far easier.

one benefit of pigovian taxes is increased revenue to ameliorate the externality, but it's not the main goal of the tax. the cost itself reduces demand to the socially optimal level. the government could well burn the tax revenue (or in this case, recycle the paper) and still achieve the objectives of the tax.

Compact urban settlement is a direct market substitute for the hydrocarbons which would otherwise be required to transport goods and people across longer distances.

The most important thing we can do to transition off of oil and fossil fuels is to maximize the intensity at which we utilize renewable resources which directly substitute for them.

We maximize the intensity at which urban land is utilized by phasing in a 100-1200% national or global land value tax over the next century on the appraised market price which all land is expected to sell for if cleared of improvements.

We can also promote the development of a national, inter-state, zero-emission, passenger & freight rapid-transit market several times faster than automobile highways by allowing private rail and hyper-loop operators to deduct qualified ticket sales from their land value tax liabilities.

I think you're more likely to promote a shift en masse to EV manufacturing before you're able to institute a global land value tax (Tesla is building >200k EVs/year, other manufacturers are following suit, a million EVs are sold every 6 months [1]), with the added benefit that all of that EV manufacturing is going to stoke demand for more battery manufacturing capacity we'll need for utility scale energy storage. We don't stop building solar PV, wind, battery, and EV manufacturing capacity until CO2 emissions are halted (remember, we need to account for current energy usage, the transition of mobility to electricity, electrical growth and the amount of energy we're going to need to sequester existing atmospheric carbon back into the ground).

Urbanizing is a noble goal, but not realistic in the decades timeframe the necessary solutions demand. Build more solar [2], wind [3], energy storage, and electric transportation now, rebuild cities over time. Everything I mention above can be scaled in a massively parallel fashion.

https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank (Project Drawdown: Summary of Solutions by Overall Rank)

[1] https://i.imgur.com/21eLTwr.jpg

[2] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/01/22/solar-will-rebound-th... (Solar will rebound this year with more than 100 GW of new capacity)

[3] https://nawindpower.com/eia-2019-to-be-biggest-year-for-new-... (EIA: 2019 To Be Biggest Year For New Wind Capacity Since 2012)

The biggest current roadblock to urbanization is the insanely high cost of living in cities, and your solution to this is to add an up-to-1200% land value tax?

This would be a really quick way to force working class people to live even further away from the city than they already are.

Yes, I believe the goal is to kill the low density housing with 2 parking spaces per unit. For mass transit to truly work, we need more density.

Why we subsidize low density suburbs is beyond me.

We need to stop pretending roads are free and trains/trams are subsidized. Government plays an essential role in transportation. People should pay for the roads they drive, income adjusted. That's healthier capitalism, because the prices are clear and better mobility = better markets.

I don't think taxing oil consumption is the answer. I think what happens is that any taxes on carbon / fossil fuels just get passed down to the consumer, who are basically forced to pay it and can do very little to change their energy consumption. Sure, they can buy an electric car, but they still need to power and heat their home. Energy companies make the same profits, families are left holding the tax bill.

Taxing consumption of anything like this is normally done combined with something to try to give back the exact same number of dollars to the same people in the same ratio, at least initially. Then nobody is worse off from the tax.

Then, anyone who can reduce their usage will end up paying less tax, but still getting back nearly the same amount, and therefore profiting from their reduction.

That ideal is hard to achieve, but tends to be done roughly. For example, putting a tax on gas, but then equally subsidising something else related to cars, like car insurance, or the purchase price of new cars, would hit mostly the same people.

It was actually a decade from 2006.

++ Young, artisnal, carbon is the only way to go.

Your proposal is reasonable, assuming that "young" means "recently extracted from the atmosphere."

Sure let's stop consuming fossil fuels and go back to the stone age. All for a scientific theory that has zero evidence (save for computer models that are always wrong).

Zero evidence?

The the surface of the earth has temperature X. We can measure measure X with some degree of precision.

Any theory of physics that makes a prediction about the earth's temperature can be checked against the measured value of X.

All widely accepted theories that predict a temperature near X rely on the role of greenhouse gases and CO2 in particular to yield that temperature. And they all agree, more or less, that every doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration will result in an equal additive increase in our equilibrium temperature (so equilibrium temp grows as the log of the CO2 content).

Granted, to make _very precise_ predictions, you need to add forcing factors and feedback mechanisms that are hard to measure and hard to model and that's where computer simulations run into trouble. But the theory is sound and widely accepted.

I got most of the above a few years ago from some version of this class: https://www.coursera.org/learn/global-warming

Also the instructor's book, and the IPCC report from a few years ago.

Think about what you're arguing about. Do you really think any evidence you can cite here will change this person's mind?

Not really. But others who are "on the fence" need to see that assertions like the GP are not uncontestable.

Save the planet from what? A few degrees celsius warmer weather and extreme weather events?

It's not as if we're going to wind up with an inhabitable planet if we keep burning fossil fuels.

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