Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

I don't like this. I like the sentiment but repeat after me: politicians should never ever insert themselves into engineering! The only exception would be politicians who are engineers, and there are not many of these in the US. Bernie Sanders it not an engineer.

When they do we tend to get ignorant choices (because 99% of them are not scientists or engineers) and corruption. A great example is our biofuels programs that gave us corn ethanol, which is literally the absolute worst possible biofuel for EROEI. Another example unrelated to energy is the Space Shuttle. NASA would have built a much more affordable and reusable orbiter had Congress not mandated a bunch of extra capabilities that were never used, specific contractor mandates, and other meddling that ruined the design.

Just tax fossil fuels and other carbon emitting activities. Do not allow politicians to get involved in picking the alternatives or they'll pick the wrong ones or be influenced by lobbyists for the most expensive or politically well connected ones.

I also don't like the categorical rejection of nuclear. I'm not strongly for expansion of current-generation nuclear power but I am also not at all opposed to more research on better ways of exploiting fission energy. I'm also strongly in support of increasing funding for fusion energy given the progress that's occurred in areas like compact superconductors and computer modeling. If we can solve fusion we'd at the very least have a source of base load power for regions with strong base load power demands and that lack large scale renewable resources sufficient to meet that demand.

> or be influenced by lobbyists for the most expensive or politically well connected ones.

Sanders has categorically rejected PAC money and large donations from high-profile donors. If you had a rate a candidate's platform based on likelihood of lobbyist influence, this would undoubtedly be one of the least corrupt proposals.

I think Sanders is pretty honest in this department. The problem is that if he becomes President (or influences the next one) and puts a gigantic trillion dollar money pot out there, lots of politicians and bureaucrats are going to be involved in doling that out. It's gonna be a wild pork stampede and we'll end up with a lot of BS shell companies doing "green" stuff that involve no real engineers or other people who know how to actually build anything.

Edit to clarify: I also think we'll end up with a lot of well-meaning people who simply don't understand the science or the engineering wasting a lot of money. Corruption is a problem but it's not just corruption.

That's why I like incentives much more, whether they be tax incentives or general goal-oriented subsidies. There's a lot of surface area to work with here, not just carbon taxes:

* Extending and deepening EV tax credits.

* Reforming zoning laws to encourage density and eliminate impediments to it. This is largely a state thing but the Fed could apply pressure or incentives to states. It would also help with the housing affordability crisis that exists in some cities and states.

* Tax credits to encourage higher density housing, such as an increased mortgage deduction for condominiums in multi-story buildings and a rent deduction.

* Building public transit, a lot of public transit, and fixing/elminiating the regulatory and bureaucratic nonsense that stops the US from building high speed rail like other developed nations.

* Funding R&D by labs and universities with a record of producing results in areas like batteries, next-generation nuclear power, fusion, better solar PV, etc.

There are also some areas where you might have to fight with environmentalists, like expanding hydropower. I've long wondered how much hydropower potential there is in Northern Canada and how efficiently it could be transported by HVDC lines to the US. Would Canada like another big export?

The new deal worked fine and it was put forward by a politician.

That's a very understandable reaction, and very much a possibility.

What data do we have on how much is skimmed from proposals like this, or fraudulent companies that are set up to exploit this funding?

Michael Lewis talked a bit about this in The Fifth Risk, particularly the Solyndra scandal. The Obama administration took a lot of heat politically for Solyndra, which in reality amounted to a tiny tiny fraction of funds made available for solar development, and the overall solar research fund that Obama allocated wound up turning a profit for the government. You wouldn't know that based on the reporting though.

> politicians should never ever insert themselves into engineering! Never. Ever.

So Manhattan Project and Apollo program were mistakes, in your opinion?

In those cases politicians set the goals. They did not pick how it was to be done. If NASA came back and said "we think we can put humans on the moon with a big catapult" and they were right, we would have built a big catapult. They set the goals and let the real professionals do the work.

What I dislike about this and other proposals is politicians specifically saying what technologies should and should not be used. That's the road to an expensive failure. Instead we should just tax carbon and set emissions goals and let the people who know how to build stuff build stuff.

Thanks for clarifying that's a fair point.

See my caveat in reply to GP though

Look at Dieselgate where the engineers pulled the wool over the politicians’ eyes and they merrily kept cranking down the emissions targets without checking if or how they were met

There are several problems with a just-carbon-tax approach:

1) Carbon taxes just get passed on to the consumer. This makes them incredibly unpopular, because consumers see a short-term cost, but not a short-term benefit. In the US, this means that implementing a carbon tax is a good way to make sure you get voted out and replaced by a climate-denier in the next election. The Yellow Vests movement in France was sparked largely by a fuel tax.

2) Using a consumption tax also means that the poorest people of society pay the highest cost (relatively speaking.) It's unjust to make the poorest people pay the most, especially since they also do the least "damage."

3) According to the IPCC report, a carbon tax high enough to effect a rapid enough change would effectively be a fossil fuel ban anyway.

Engineers are equally stupid on average as everyone else. It takes an engineer to believe in apolitical money or unbiased facial recognition “predictions”.

Sixteen T's is too many T's. He needs a plan with less T's.

Agreed there too. A few tens or hundreds of B's in the right places could have a huge effect. I'd put the money on extending EV tax credits and subsidizing solar, wind, and grid-scale storage, and fund it with a big tax on carbon emitting fossil fuels.

I would make it 60 and force the EU to pay at least 30%.

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