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Comment by erentz | Hacker News Reader

It’s interesting to see this article for me because it is similar to the “Bitcoin is bad because CO2” articles and arguments that arise from time to time. To which I’ve unsuccessfully attempted to argue you can’t really say Bitcoin is bad and shouldn’t be allowed to exist for that reason without also agreeing that other stupid things we do with computers should suffer the same fate. Which surprisingly attracts a fair amount of defenders for the Snapchat et-als.

What we can do is to be neutral to how it’s used, and instead make sure that electricity is appropriately priced to cover its externalities. That means a carbon tax. The same solution is still the right one for Bitcoin as it is for other silly computer uses mentioned in this article. If it becomes too expensive to deliver Snapchat when electricity is properly priced then Snapchat won’t exist. So on.

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The pluses about a carbon tax is that it also affects the more invisible ways that we are killing the environment - hating on big tech is cool, hating on the car you use to get to work isn't as cool. Both should be taxed relative to their emissions.

The ironic bit is personal cars account for 20% of the US emissions already. Transportation is the largest category, at near 30%. Electricity is a close second, but pretending data centers use more than say the air conditioners across the US is probably false. Sure, per individual, data centers might use more, but something like better insulating houses would probably do more on net for emissions than just dismantling one data center, and ditching your car and riding public transit will probably do more than that.

There's always some other industry/technology/nation/group that uses <X> times the energy: "China emits far more CO_2" (total), "The US emits far more CO_2" (per capita), "Industry emits far more than households", etc.

I mean you're right that it has to be everyone, not just one or two groups that reduce emissions. But that is the point actually. Most likely, the way to address emissions will include consumption by the US and production by China. Any imaginations that anything outside of that (or short of that) will fail.

carbon taxes are regressive insofar as the poor spend a larger % of their income on fuels than the rich and this is often not negotiable - people can't choose to e.g. not commute half an hour to work when they don't have much disposable income to start with, whereas the rich can generally pay for whatever quantity they want to consume already.

so the point of the tax (reduce consumption) unfairly hits the poor.

A Carbon tax would also disproportionately help the poor, especially the global poor, so it's not fair to call it regressive without finding a way to put some numbers on both the costs and benefits. Besides, the money gained from a carbon tax isn't lost, it can be reinvested in things like public transit infrastructure.

Public transit is not viable in most of the US.

> Public transit is not viable in most of the US.

Since many US cities had public transit a century ago (and don't today), I wonder if you mean technically viable, economically viable, or politically attainable. I'm guessing the latter, and it's sad.

No I mean it is not viable in any way if you leave the bubble of US cities which account for a small percentage of the total area. Rural US is struggling just to make school buses work. The distances are too great and the people too few to ever support public transit. Any tax on fuel/cars screws rural areas who have no other choice.

That's fine, you can roll out electrical vehicles in the rural US. The majority of the US population live in cities or suburbs of cities. That is who needs to see development and infrastructure that enables the use of public transportation.

That climate benefit from a carbon tax would only start indirectly helping the poor in decades, while a carbon tax is a direct immediate burden; and you can't just tell them to "take one for the team and wait it out" as that just ends up with them burning down your capital while wearing traffic vests. Using the carbon tax for regular infrastructure purposes is also a bad idea because when it is working it will go down overtime as the public optimizes their carbon use, as it should. Tying it to unrelated societal maintenance creates a pervasive incentive for the government to somehow force the continual use of carbon (probably through questionably legal means) while sustaining the tax in order to get income up.

And all this also avoids the core issue in actually deciding if the unpaid externalize of a unit of carbon is $200, $20, or $0.02; if you can't even get people to universally agree if there is a crisis in the first place than how on earth are you going to get them to agree on the monetary value of said crisis.

You could even use it for a universal basic income. It wouldn’t be enough to live from, but could nudge people to, for example, spend a weekend in “nice city a 100 km train ride away”, rather than “nice city a 2,000 km airplane flight away”.

You'd have to have trains for people to ride. The US systematically dismantled trains and made highways in their place.

Let's be honest, everyone huffs and puffs around this but don't have a handle on the facts. Look here[0]. The US is by far the one of the largest GHG producer per capita, and this is not a pinko anti-American bit, it's solely the US, not Europe when taking to account total emissions and emissions per capita. The US is second on the total scale of emissions per year, and not shown here (can't find the link) but first in terms of cumulative positions over the years, but it's a good thing to remember that China expends a lot of their emissions to produce things we consume.

A carbon tax would be regressive for the American middle class. On the other hand, it would in fact be beneficial for the global south/poor. That is one of the difficult things about this, because a carbon tax would hit the middle class (note I didn't say working class) in the US which has quite a bit of power globally through their ability to elect the US president, so implementing any sort of carbon tax without giving them some deal will be moot politically. It would hit the working poor in the US pretty hard as well, although a good fraction of them don't own a car[1], so they wouldn't face a tax on the largest source of GHG's in the US.

[0] https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/sc...

[1] About 19% of people who earn less than 25K per year (yes! very poor) don't own a personal vehicle. https://www.bts.gov/sites/bts.dot.gov/files/legacy/publicati...

It's possible to find ways to give some of the takings back to those who are less well off.

> That means a carbon tax.

This seems like the most sensible route, rather than trying to dictate what is 'ok' and what is not.

>you can’t really say Bitcoin is bad and shouldn’t be allowed to exist for that reason without also agreeing that other stupid things we do with computers should suffer the same fate

That point is debatable because Bitcoin and snapchat are different in kind. For bitcoin to function, it must be deliberately very computationally expensive. Generally speaking other software limits deliberately costly operations to certain functions (e.g. password hashing) and inefficiencies caused by of developers disinterested in performance can be reworked. Even the resource draw of a high end gaming for a few (or many) hours a week and a 24/7 miner are distinguishable in both raw and cost/benifit ways.

Hmm...how would it effect Porn? I would guess they are larger than Snapchat.

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