This is how I feel climate change will be tackled (whether too late or not). It will just become cheaper to go green and being green is just a side effect.
On the other hand, when technology improves so that electric cars cost less per mile than gasoline cars, people won't necessarily buy them to be green, they'll buy them because they're a cheaper form of transportation that happens to be greener.
Same with wind and solar power. When a solar farm on 10 acres of land can produce more energy than a coal plant on the same 10 acres, then power companies will build them instead of coal - not to be "green", but to make more money.
As we're running out of time we ideally need both to happen, but it's good that green tech is becoming increasingly more financially viable. As a little gem, just about all reports from the SA Tesla battery installation make for simply fantastic reading.
What do you think about going after the things that are actually harmful, instead of following a red herring? I mean, sure, cars should of course be dealt with also, but if you really want to lower carbon emissions fast, then shouldn't we go for the big fish first?
Do you have a link to figures that show this?
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-the-15-biggest-ships-i...
Thanks for the link. So it isn't carbon emissions that exceed those of cars but SOx and NOx (which are still a problem).
Well, merely talking to them isn't going to achieve any change, so the plan is to tax them?
Do you think no one has tried talking to any of these people about climate change yet?
This is energetically impossible, I'm afraid. Even if you count the area of the plant plus the area of its corresponding mine and the transport links between them. Because the energy density of coal is so incredibly high.
On the other hand, now that Drax has switched to burning wood, you might get more energy efficiency from the same (huge) area of woodland by direct solar farming instead. Annoyingly I can't find any numbers, other than an estimate that if Drax was limited to domestic wood (rather than importing it from the US, using oil-fired shipping) it would consume every tree in the UK within a year.
> On the other hand, when technology improves so that electric cars cost less per mile than gasoline cars, people won't necessarily buy them to be green, they'll buy them because they're a cheaper form of transportation that happens to be greener.
Carbon taxes are like trash disposal fees. If your business dumps trash into the landfill or carbon into the atmosphere, the public should not have to subsidize your business by paying for that. You should pay to manage your own waste.
Gas cars are cheaper than electric at least partly because we're all subsidizing them by allowing them to dump waste for free into the air that we all own, and paying on their behalf for all the damages that causes (asthma, climate change, flooding, etc). A carbon tax would remove that subsidy and make fossil fuels compete on a level playing field.
And yes, once the subsidy is removed, the market can sort it out.
Humanity will be fine. We just will have to learn to live without all the cool stuff we like, like polar bears and butterflies and Amsterdam.
Like arable land.
Erosion is the bigger problem, 1/3rd of all arable land lost over the last 40 years. [1]
[1] - https://www.businessinsider.com/earth-has-lost-a-third-of-ar...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/climate/biodiversity-exti...
What's happening right now is absolutely unprecedented and it will kill a lot of people. It's demoralizing how even within a crowd that's supposed to value science we have people waving away what's happening right now.
Yes, it will kill a lot of people. And it's a disaster. But humanity will adapt and be fine. Kind of like how humanity survived world wars doesn't discount how awful those wars were.
Realistically, the universe doesn't care one way or the other about us.