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Comment by Areading314 | Hacker News Reader

The big polluters, like airlines, energy, transportation, and chemical companies are the ones that will have to take these steps to see any effect. Every bit helps, of course, but the cost of implementing something like this is doable for some, while for many would mean extinction, or fundamental changes to their business model.

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I think we need to implement world-wide tax on pollution to avoid some crazy externalitiees.

For example, cheap flights used frequently are a ridiculous luxury we cannot afford. I know lots of people that use budget airlines more than once per month to make weekend trips across Europe.

The amount of CO2 they are putting into the atmosphere is simply insane. A bit more than doing the same trip by car, for each passenger.

A carbon tax is well known to be the rational solution to the problem. Even conservatives agree.

It just happens to be politically impossible.

People pretend it's hard to create a carbon tax, but it's really not. Just tax the fuel (gas/oil/coal), and the cost will be passed on to polluters.

Edit, of course, politically yes it's hard.

Does it have to be?

Planet Money had an episode about "revenue-neutral carbon tax", where all the money collected is returned back to the tax payers, to spend however they want.

The point of this tax is not to raise money, but to change behavior. This, a family that drives to work and school every day will pay more carbon tax, but this will be offset by the tax refund (or lower income tax). And a family that finds ways to reduce their carbon footprint will benefit from the tax refund and able to spend it on other things.

WA state had a carbon tax initiative but the revenues went to environmental efforts, and it failed. I think if it were made revenue-neutral, or heck, even made as an overall tax-cut to please the fiscal conservatives, I think it would pass (although it would face pushback from environmentally minded about not doing enough).

Here is the Carbon Fee and Dividend proposal: https://citizensclimatelobby.org/carbon-fee-and-dividend/

I like it a lot, but the problem is the major industries that will be heavily impacted/closed down as a result. They have immense political power, and I don't see any way around that. Hope I'm wrong.

And that's of course just one country out of 200. There is no local solution to global warming!

They tried that here in Canada, and it is both too small to have much impact, and getting massive pushback from the Conservative party.

You have to keep in mind that even if it’s revenue neutral, explaining the scheme to taxpayers is going to be difficult, and your opponents are going to try their darndest to make it sound unappealing, even if it means spreading misinformation.

The trouble is “polluters” is everyone in society. People who use a lot of carbon feel personally attacked bu such a tax...because itmis in fact directly affecting them.

A carbon tax is my top priority. There’s no sense denying the opposition though. The yellow vest protests in france were from a fuel tax.

Are electric airplanes feasible in the foreseeable future?

No. That's physically not efficient. Synthetic fuels may be, though.

We already know we can produce jet fuel from captured CO2 from the air. The trick is making it cheaper, particularly energy-wise. We can't dedicate half the world for solar panels to make fuel.

> The trick is making it cheaper

Honestly, this is a problem with a lot of technologies. Especially in the green sector. That doesn't mean we shouldn't keep funding research into it and trying to make it cheaper, but also a reason to be cautious.

Foreseeable future, yes. Short term future (<15 years)? I wouldn't hold my breath. Might happen, but probably not.

I think it’s on all of us, including all the corporations. We should have a carbon tax to disincentivize mass c02 production - at the moment all the profits are private and all the losses (to the environment) are public. If they want to pay someone who’s planting trees for carbon caps then that’s fine for me. Just solve the damn problem. Who’s standing in the way? Shareholders of the above companies (and by proxy, the lobbyists and politicians). Because protective action doesn’t get them gains. It requires government action.

It's literally economics 101: externalities, but for some crazy reason in the US it's seen as a leftist anti-capitalist issue.

Because you are acting like this would punish the company. It might to an extent but in reality consumers would hurt the most. That in my opinion is why it doesn't happen.

The tyranny of the majority :/

Not as much when the carbon tax is tax-neutral. In Canada we started getting back a carbon tax credit. Consumer impact is still there but a lot more mitigated.

It’s meant to ‘punish’ consumers: it needs to be painful enough that consumers reduce their consumption, otherwise pollution will not be reduced.

Right but it's not going to punish consumers equally. It will hurt the poor a lot more than the rich imho. Essentially a regressive tax moving the burden for the climate change problem to the poor.

Because reducing US emissions to 0 will have no effect on global warming.

Reducing emissions by 14% will have no impact? I doubt that very much.

And that's just direct emissions; the emissions of other countries can often be attributed to supplying to the US.

It is difficult to get people to agree if it means gas and cheeseburgers cost twice as much.

Individuals matter too!

Netflix made had $5.8B in revenue from small $10-20 subscription users!

Today, for $20 a month you can offset your own carbon footprint! This matters because the more resources that goes into fighting climate change allows innovation. Even by generating more demand for carbon credits and offsetting, new businesses can thrive and grow by fighting climate change!

I've been super obsessed with https://projectwren.com (YC S19) for these exact reason!

Way less than $20 a month in a lot of the world too. Americans have a footprint twice as high as Brits, even.

Cars and air-con are the main offenders there, right?

And air travel

I like it, but why do I have to give my email for emission calculation? It's off-putting, I don't want even more spam. And I will tell them where do I live and how, will they package it with my email and sell it to ad companies as a handy profile?

Sorry to be paranoid, but most startups (uber, airbnb, paypal, not to mention facebook ...) are evil and exploitative.

Wren co-founder here — we ask for your email so we can send you a report on your footprint (if you choose) or come back to the onboarding flow later. We're spinning the calculator out into an open resource soon though!

Finally, we just started two months ago and have not sold user information to ad companies nor do we ever plan to. That sounds like an evil and unnecessary way to go about not accomplishing our mission.

Just got my first report from Project Wren! Loved it so much I copied and pasted it here so I can share it:

https://www.notion.so/chrislu/Project-Wren-August-17th-Updat...

It’s a great project but they could be more clear about that 20% cut they take and why it’s double what they partners take. How does it scale? 20% makes sense when you are dealing with, say, 100m of donations, but not so great when it’s 1B. At 1B they’d be taking 200m for what? Hiring the best talent in the world, to do what exactly? I don’t know, I wish them well and hopefully they get more clear about their cut and lower that over time. I think if you are really going to make an impact you must be targeting few billions of donations and 20% is just unreasonable.

I get where you are coming from, but should we really tolerate fundamental changes to our planet over fundamental changes to a business model?

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