Hacker News Reader

Comment by codebolt | Hacker News Reader

As a Norwegian tax payer I do feel a bit like a schmuck for paying Indonesians not to destroy their own country. For one, what's to stop them from cutting these forests once the payouts stop coming? A better endeavor might be to invest in environmentally sustainable industries in Indonesia.

View on HN

As a Western developed nation inhabitant, you and indeed most HN readers benefit enormously for your rich lifestyle on past carbon emissions by your predecessors, which those in that country have not benefitted from. This is a good way to incentivise those countries who - quite reasonably - feel it's unfair that they don't get to use up any of that carbon to develop their nation towards a rich modern lifestyles. So, here is one solution.

Norway did not contribute all that much to carbon emissions directly. The electric grid historically been and still is hydro, and the country was never really industrialized in the first place.

Norway's wealth comes from exporting oil and gas. That's not very indirect.

It's semantics, but isn't that the definition of indirect, but with a clear link?

That's exactly what indirect means. Only a tiny portion of this oil and gas was ever used in Norway, the rest was exported. A lot of it was used up by developing nations.

Either way there were no hydrocarbon exports prior to early 1970s. Unless by "predecessors" you mean gen-x'ers.

Norway gained a lot of wealth from extracting and selling the oil.

All parties in the transaction (producer, middle men, end users) "should" be carbon taxed to some degree.

It's not obvious to me why you'd only want to carbon tax the consumer.

Similarly, in public debate there's a lot of finger pointing at oil companies. The public can be somewhat less vocal about wanting to carbon tax the demand side of the trade, of which they play a large role.

It did gain a lot of wealth of selling oil, however it has nothing to do with Norway CO2 emissions.

Carbon footprint describes where the source of CO2 pollution is. You can make plastics from all that oil you buy or burn it all, that's on you. If you do burn it, you become CO2 pollutant, really hard to see the controversial part here.

Nonsense. You can define "carbon footprint" that way if you like, but I view that as an accounting definition. You've just decided to define it that way.

CO2 pollution is stored in the atmosphere, which is a shared global resource.

I'd argue that carbon taxing should be designed to discourage economic activity that directly or indirectly leads to greenhouse gas emissions, you need to disincentivise production as well as consumption as well as associated enabling activities such as shipping the stuff. Encourage all of these actors to do something else that results in lower net carbon emissions at the global system level.

The consumer is the one actually putting that carbon into the atmosphere. Taxing the consumer therefore encourages better uses of oil (such as making polymers).

Per capita?

98% of Norwegian energy sector is renewables, so any way you slice it.

That seems like a questionable statistic, considering that something like 20% of Norway's GDP comes from oil and natural gas. Or by "energy sector" do you only mean the energy that is consumed domestically?

Energy that is produced domestically. It is both consumed and exported to neighbours. That's a commonly accepted way to account for it in carbon footprint.

I generally agree, but we are at such a bad position now where any and all attempts need to be made to preserve our planet. It might not be fair for westerners to pay for such initiatives, but lets remember that most western countries have outsourced manufacturing to developing nations in Asia/Africa etc and have turned a blind eye to the shitty practices of these companies as long as it suited them (aka, as long as the products are cheap)

The Guardian had a really interesting blurb about palm oil[1]. One of the takeaways is that as bad as palm oil is, other plants consume far more resources to produce equivalent amounts of oil. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Soy has already wreaked havoc on the Amazon, and Bolsonaro in all his septic glory is a staunch advocate of destroying as much of the Amazon as he can in pursuit of short term profits.

The other blurb[2] I read recently was about Maya Bay. A situation like this is a bit more amenable to ecotourism and whatnot than palm plantation... but still it's a daunting task to try to preserve the environment in a country that's very dependent upon it for short-term sustenance.

1: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/19/palm-oil-ingred...

2: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/the_beach_nobody...

> One of the takeaways is that as bad as palm oil is, other plants consume far more resources to produce equivalent amounts of oil.

Yes people keep saying that. However it is not an argument that should stop the debate. The difference is that palm oil production has a lot of issues due to the location: wildlife like orangutangs is killed, old rainforest is deforested, native people are displaced, and it occurs in very corrupted countries (Malaysia and Indonesia). While for example rapeseed oil production requires more land we don't for example here in Norway have those same issues with production as palm oil.

Natural rain forests are just not economically productive. No matter what industry you promote in Indonesia, they can always make extra money by cutting down the forest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com