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Comment by skosch | Hacker News Reader

Carbon pricing, carbon pricing, carbon pricing.

It's the one thing virtually all economists agree on as the most efficient way to catalyze large-scale change (although we'll still need regulation and sequestration as well).

Politically, the most realistic way to get this done without a huge public backlash is via a revenue-neutral carbon fee and dividend. There's a bill before congress right now [0]. Canada implemented a variation on this at a federal level recently.

One of the most active groups supporting this kind of legislation is Citizens' Climate Lobby – if you care about this issue, please consider joining.

[0] Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act: https://teddeutch.house.gov/uploadedfiles/deutch_014_xml_116...

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If China subscribed to such a system and agreed to operate on a level playing field, then I might give more credence to it. However they aren't, and they won't. No amount of sequestration in the United States or Canada will have a meaningful impact on world pollution unless the world's largest polluter is held accountable. Anything less than that is counter-productive, putting us economically at a disadvantage to a country, and a communist regime, that would like nothing more than to chip away at US hegemony in the world.

China already has the largest carbon trading market in the world [0]. Perhaps it's not aggressive enough, but they're significantly more ambitious than the US, and their population isn't nearly as wealthy to begin with, so it'll hurt them more. Either way, we can chose to invest now, or pay the price for this silly game of chicken later.

Besides – how do you suggest we get China and India to cut emissions without doing the same, if not more, at home? Perhaps Border Adjustments [1] can alleviate some of your fears; they would protect domestic industry. All of this has already been worked out to stupendous levels of detail by legal scholars and Nobel-prize winning economists [2] – your armchair criticism just shows that you're decades behind the policy wonks. Leave it to them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_national_carbon_tradin...

[1] https://www.carbontax.org/nuts-and-bolts/border-adjustments/

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/business/economic-science...

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