Climate talks break up with no agreement on carbon trading
ft.com
ft.com
Most of the governments involved in negotiating a common international agreements on carbon markets unofficially represent for-profit interests seeking advantage in the structure of the carbon market. There is an enormous amount of profit that can be realized here, and the good faith actors are in the minority. This is quite normal even in small international agreements but it becomes exponentially harder to arrive at an agreement that is minimally corrupted with respect to its nominal purpose as the profit incentive to corrupt the agreement increases. The last time I looked in on the current state of the carbon market negotiations, it had been corrupted beyond redemption. I have no faith that something useful will result.
This is why international agreements are unlikely to have a material impact on climate change. International agreements tend to only be effective when there is minimal profit or advantage to be gained by corrupting the purpose of the agreement. Climate change activities simply involve too much money for an international agreement to produce a credible outcome. It is the wrong tool for the job.
If California does, it matters : - It shows it is possible, and increase political pressures on others - It create a pressure and market (California is big enough and Burundi or Alaska are not) for new solutions (technology based or not) that can be implemented elsewhere - It help decreasing the cost of many existing solutions, and everybody will benefits from it - It is possible to set up carbon tax at the border, increasing the incentive to follow California path
I believe the common name for this approach is "fee and dividend". I'm surprised I don't see it discussed very much. I would think that it should be palatable across the political spectrum.
IMF says "Globally, subsidies remained large at $4.7 trillion" https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2019/05/02/Glo...
Seems a fat regressive subsidie...
The solution is to shift taxes and benefits rather than just adding new ones.
In contrast, if one or more countries develop a cheaper, clean technology that can be exported globally (perhaps at a cost) all countries would be incentivized to switch to it to save costs, and emissions start to plummet.
We need a full court press on getting to next-generation energy sources that stand to be 10x cheaper than existing ones. I'm not sure if you can get there with solar and other renewables alone, but from first principles (ie physics) it sure seems tractable to get there with some combination of nuclear technology and those sources.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend#Unit...
But of course they wouldn’t put one in without excluding everyone powerful enough to make a fuss about it.
By limiting the number of certificates, you can steer exactly how much CO2 will be emitted in any given year.
And the cost of CO2 means that procedures that reduce CO2 emissions become financially viable, starting with the most effective ones.
Assuming you can track CO2 emissions correctly, it’s a genius instrument.
Carbon trading would result in billionaires and large funds finding a new way to make more money at the expense of everyone else and solve little.
A tax at CO2 origination is simpler, less opportunity to game, and more effective.
It is a great way to destroy a market (and a very important one), creating monopolies everywhere.
Also assuming that you meaningfully enforce violations. Although this is also a problem for a tax.
1) The total amount of emissions are set for all participants with the sum of all participants emissions being set based on current scientific data for stopping climate change.
2) No double counting. If you sell it off you can't also use it.
The climate talks failed on the carbon trading discussions because people would not agree to those.
While carbon tax is nice and possible a good method to combat climate change, it is not immune to those problems. Carbon tax also have an rather uneven impact, so I personally see it as a tool to be used in specific industries where the benefit costs analysis show the intended incentives without causing unintended side effects such urbanization.
carbon volatility index!
carbon tax default swap!
I want it all
The point of carbon taxes is to affect behavior, not fund government.
I'm saying that whichever way you slice it, it's still possible for this to be abused.
And w.r.t. size of the bureaucracy, not so much either. The size of actual government bureaucracy is quite insignificant compared to size of transfer payments in this case. Like 1% or less.
And this particular tax has fantastic property; since it will drive down carbon use, the amount of tax collected will go down over time, thus reducing it's drag on the economy.
Hardcore market fundamentalists, like myself, love carbon taxes.
I agree with your post, but I would note that this is not entirely true in the US. Benefits that such as SNAP and Medicaid that are only used by a vulnerable segment of the population have been a frequent target for clawbacks. Social Security and Medicare are much more resistant to politically-motivated clawbacks yet not resistant to meddling in general since they are not enjoyed equally.
A benefit that exists at the level of “everyone gets $N per month” would seem to be much more resistant to political meddling.
The US government has a debt problem. The Social Security fund has lent money to the US government. Why can't similar things happen for the carbon tax fund?
I do agree in principle (with some reservations perhaps).
[] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21913812-this-changes-ev...
About NOx and SOx, those are local pollutants. Local problems are much easier to fix.
Whether you think that's an alternative, or a <expletive deleted> is up to you.
I doubt it. People don’t want to reduce consumption. People want their detached houses and front and back yards, they want their international vacations, domestic vacations, they want to drive around without thinking how much it will cost them. People want to see their children live easier lives than them, not harder. Conveniently ignoring their great great grandchildren’s lives, but there’s comfort in plausible deniability of not knowing the future.
> I doubt it.
Are you willing to consider it as a possibility though?
No doubt the remainder of what you say is true, to an unknown degree (ignore this at your own peril), but if you had god-like omniscience to simultaneously see into the minds (including the subconscious) of all people on the planet, the true reality of their beliefs and what sort of compromises they would be willing to make under certain conditions - might the material aspects play less of a role in the impasse than you and others think?
Draw upon the knowledge (personal, and observations of third parties) you have about human relationships, particularly conflict. Have you noticed that sometimes people don't behave completely rationally, sometimes going so far as to even lie to themselves about why they do the things they do? Are there sometimes situations where a minor disagreement finds a way to grow into a full on battle where the original objective disagreement has faded into the background, the fight itself takes on a life of its own, and people revert to their irrational, tribal, caveman roots, seeking no particular goal other than revenge?
Might there be some aspect that creeps into the political realm? If it did, what might it look like? Might it look something like irrational, dishonest & disingenuous, hate-filled discussions in social media, as opposed to good faith fact-based discussions where both parties are seeking to achieve a state of mutually beneficial compromise? Do we see any evidence of these two conversation types taking place in social media today?
Jonathan Haidt is the only academic I know of that seems to have noticed this aspect of the situation (as related to political polarization, not climate change) and set his mind to studying it. Does anyone know of others?
edit: yet again i'm downvoted to -2 because I dare explain the shape of the curves in plain english and then link to my source (the canonical authoritative source no less).
hacker news is swarming with climate change denalists downvoters.
Say you're a week from the paper being due, and need to decide between an A thesis and a B thesis.
The A thesis would be great, but you simply can't do the research necessary to prove it in a week. If you went with it your paper would be a complete failure because you'd either spend all your time on research and not have enough time to do the actual writing of the paper, or you decide to spend most of your time writing the paper but it's impossibly to make the arguments because you simply don't have the facts necessary.
Instead you pick the B quality thesis, and write a workable paper arguing for it. Sure your paper would be better with a better thesis, but given your position when you started it was your best option.
With climate change, if we let perfect be the enemy of the good we might end up doing nothing which is clearly worse than doing something insufficient. Badness scales (nonlinearly) with amount we reduce emissions. We want the best solution we have the ability to implement. (Figuring that out is the hard part, and I don't know enough to do that).
Note: Your source is worthless in this forum. No one is going to read through hundreds of pages to figure out if they support your claim. It would be as if I wrote nothing but "You're wrong (cite the Encylcopedia Brittanica)". I'm pretty sure you're right, ironically because of reputable secondary sources I've read that summarized the report.
That is exactly what you are doing in arguing for delay and moderation. To the tune of 38 gigatonnes per year.
> Note: Your source is worthless in this forum. No one is going to read through hundreds of pages to figure out if they support your claim.
I linked to a JPG with three 1960 - 2100 graphs that lay out exactly what number of gigatons leads to what warming on what timeframe. It is "Figure 1" from the "Summary for Policy Makers". There is nothing more basic or dumbed down that can still be called science.
I'm arguing for implementing an imperfect plan sooner. I don't understand what you mean.
> I linked to a JPG with three 1960 - 2100 graphs that lay out exactly what number of gigatons leads to what warming on what timeframe. It is the absolute barest possible minimum you should understand to have an informed opinion on the topic.
You're completely right. I saw the start of the link and assumed you linked to the full report.
then why did you start with
> Why I think you reach the wrong conclusion
I confess I got lost in your extended hypotheticals, but your clear intent was to contradict no?
> We have unfortunately blown our time window for a moderate response.
Because I believe our best option is to work for a moderate response sooner, for the reasons I've already said
There's a million ways how some bad steps being taken could end up in a catastrophe. Look at the situation with the Amazon and how aggressive some countries are against the Brazilian government. Some countries (France) are even bypassing the government to deal with local authorities. Situations like that can very quickly spiral out of control. They might make people be even less accepting of doing something about climate change and they can even spark political instability, which very well can lead to hot conflicts.
The climate situation is going to progressively get worse. It will even accelerate the rate at which it gets worse, but it's not going to explode like a bomb. Political situations can explode like that and when that happens, then nobody will care about climate change.
We can't afford not to be moderate on an issue like this. You can't solve climate change at once. It'll take sustained effort and a lot of time. You can't build it on shaky ground.
>hacker news is swarming with climate change denalists downvoters.
This type of attitude is a huge problem for people advocating for changes to be made due to climate change. You're asking for a lot of people's lives to become more difficult, but when they question or disagree on almost any point they are labelled evil and stupid.
Exactly. This is true of most policy disagreements. Just because you think my plan won't do what I propose it will do doesn't mean you're stupid and evil, even if some other people are opposing it because they are stupid and evil.
Since none can tell me how we are going to enforce this, I withdraw my vote.
The only hope that we have left is that speculative investors drive up the price. The more middlemen the better. If everyone bought 100€ worth of certificates every year and only sold when the price goes up it and keep them forever if the price goes down then this would at least simulate the effects of a CO2 tax because the effects would ripple through the entire economy without requiring action from politicians.
Paying directly for your own carbon sequestration doesn't work because it only has local effects, doesn't encourage prevention of emissions and it is effectively a letter of indulgence ("I'm free of my sin").
[0] many sectors are exempt, a base amount of certificates is handed out for free, the price is always low because there are too many CO2 certificates
Flying results in 2% of global CO2 emissions a year. That's hundreds of thousands of flights a day over an entire year.
Coal powered electricity results in an incredible amount of green house emissions, and it's just plain bad for the environment. How about we stop complaining about flying and stop using coal? Please, note I didn't say fossil fuels, I said coal:
https://h4labs.org/ive-got-another-stupid-idea-to-deal-with-...
We might actually buy ourselves some real time on climate change.
Sadly, the science is not that simple. When calculating the green house emissions from natural gas we also have to include methane leaks during production. Depending on what numbers you use, around 30% of all methane emissions in the US come from fracking, and methane is 28 times worse than carbon. Combined the methane and carbon dioxide from natural gas is a bigger contributor to green house effect than coal.
Of course coal is still very bad. If fracking contribute about 30% of the methane emissions, coal mining also contribute by around 9% and coal energy plants release about twice the amount of carbon in the air compared to natural gas.
The numbers also get a bit more complex if one consider short term vs long term climate change. Methane residence time in the atmosphere is much shorter than carbon dioxide, so after the current crisis of climate change the pollution that burning coal causes is harder to remove than natural gas. The damage however from climate change can be harder or impossible to fix, so its not a clear cut which of natural gas or coal is worse for our current situation.
Best is just to keep both in the ground and use hydro, geothermal, and nuclear as base load and supplemental wind/solar for industries that can take advantage of variable energy production.
Besides, the low residence time makes its contribution proportional to the rate of emission, instead of the total emitted (like CO2). That makes human-emitted methane a much easier problem to solve: if you start fighting it, the problem reduces. So, again, unless it's a large problem, it's not worth ignoring other sources to focus on it.
So, yes, coal is most of the short term problem, and nearly all of the long term problem. Coal is also the only one available on enough quantity to become a catastrophic problem. It's also a hugely disproportionate problem at the local level. It is also the one with worst economic ramping-down possibilities. Coal is the problem to solve, and if it requires increasing our methane emission by some less than 100%, it is still a non-brainier.
(Of course, on the next decades we will have to replace oil and gas by renewables anyway, or go without. And the sooner we do that, the better. But if it takes the focus away from coal, it better wait.)
I don't think I have seen any climate change research that say we can reach the goals and increase methane emission. If anything most seems to say that we need to reduce both CO2 and methane. Call me very skeptical to the claim that we could increase out methane emission by anything near 100% and still manage, but I am open to see sources.
I can't find a clear source for worldwide emissions, but every site I can find [1] [2] makes methane responsible for around 10% of the total heating. Because of the short life, doubling the emission rate would make it responsible for much less than 20% of the total heating.
The choice of focusing on 80% of the problem or 20% of it is a non-brainier. Now, I have no idea if it will satisfy your goal.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases
[2] (This one needs some calculation) https://undark.org/2019/05/13/methane-global-warming-climate...
> but at 28 times the effect of C02
By the way, it's more like 200 times (so 20000%). It is still not enough to focus on.
Flying is relevant because nothing undermines the message more than “you must curtail your lifestyle but I won’t mine”. Exactly how many climate summits have been held over videoconferencing? My employer has massively cut back on flying to meetings, we have a big screen in every meeting room instead, it works pretty well. Meanwhile politicians and celebrities refuse to cut back on private jets. There’s no truer form of climate denial than that!
"Buy from companies, and countries, that don’t use electricity from coal. Certify with either “Made with Coal Free Electric” or a nice little logo."
US and European consumer buying choices can make a difference.
https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...
... and their total emission is already double that of the US. Are you saying China take no action until they achieve parity per capita? I can think of no other reason you would mention “per capita”.
Yes, it would be bad if Chinese per capita use rose to match US per capita use, because US per capita use is already way over what is sustainable globally.
Of course, the West is already on that downward trend and China is soaring upwards with no signs of even plateauing. Within 10 years China will be technologically independent of the West and the West will have even less influence over its environmental policy than we do now.
No one has suggested that. You, however, have suggested that there is no point in the US lowering its emissions because China emits more total than does the US.
The atmosphere does not care about arbitrary political boundaries. There's a total amount of greenhouse gases we can put in it consistent with keeping global warming under any given target. A ton of CO2 from a person in China is the same as a ton of CO2 from a person in the US as far as the atmosphere is concerned.
So if a random person in China being responsible for putting about 8 tons in per year is unacceptable, then by what logic is a random person in the US putting in over 16 tons a year fine? By every physical measure, that US person is doing at least twice the harm to the atmosphere.
The US needs to be the leader on this, not making excuses not to reduce its own emissions.
The reason that per country emissions are important is that countries are convenient political and demographic units.
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2019/05/02/Glo...
we can't wait for the political leadership to get their game together any longer, and we can't wait for the part of the population that doesn't belive there is a crisis to come around either.
we need to start financing the prevention or removal of carbon from the atmosphere today, using the voluntary carbon markets that we have. there aren't another five or ten years of indecision that we can afford to waste. and we don't have any better system for emissions reductions, yet.
those of us who understand the gravity of our present climate situation have the burden of carrying everyone else on our backs to the extent that we are able. addressing our planet's health is not something that will be fair in terms of the responsibilities that we need to take. an idealistic few must come forth and create the means for our mutual salvation, and they can expect only to thanklessly toil in the short-term.
it's a bitter pill to swallow, but we need to accept it and start moving forward rather than getting mired in spite towards those who won't help, or fatalism that we can't change our situation. taking action will be our protection against depression, and chipping away at our planet's climate crisis will inspire others to join our efforts.
send me an email (it's in my profile) if you want to help/join me. i need anyone and everyone who wants to contribute.
but be warned: if you want to join my effort, at present i can promise you nothing but my appreciation and the assurance that you're trying to be one of the good guys.
I am fully with you on the importance of acting now on any grounds we can, politically, financially, with business, etcetc, don't get me wrong.
In what way will your business differ from other carbon offset businesses? I google, and I find terrapass. I donate to cotap on a monthly basis. All of these are very accessible, or am I missing something?
you are probably someone who cares about this stuff roughly a million times more than the average member of the public, but for most people, the actions you specified aren't on the radar.
nobody i've spoken to has even known about offsets, nevermind what they do or how to access the markets as an individual. people do vaguely know about the idea of "cap and trade", but that's not exactly something they think of as being relevant to their lives or their efforts to mitigate climate change, even if it is.
there's a huge gap between the public's willingness to participate in these type of carbon reduction plans and their knowledge about how to actually do so and how much they should actually be contributing to make up for their personal carbon footprint.
i'm not proposing to do anything revolutionary. creating a new source of offsets is a non-starter. my idea is merely to close the gap.
to inform people that they aren't powerless, and to reduce the friction of navigating the carbon markets at the scale they would prefer.
It's just for capitalists to believe they can keep flying by planting trees.
however, they can fund projects to help people with less money to reduce their emissions by an equal amount, generating a large value in beneficial externalities as a result.
if i purchase an offset and the proceeds go to a hydropower project in india, there's a lot more going on there than the compensation for one ton of emissions alone.
What it says to me: I know that climate change is an extremely serious problem we need to solve and I believe economics is the right place to look for the tools we'll need to incentive people to do better.
-Leasing new cars every 3 years -New iPhone every 2-4 years -New clothes every season -Corporate flights vs teleconferencing -Amazon should be there own investigation
And so on.
> The UN climate talks in Madrid ended in stalemate on Sunday, with the negotiations running two days overtime as countries squabbled over rules for a new global carbon trading market.
> At 14 days the talks, known as COP25, set a record for the longest-ever climate negotiations, but failed to produce any agreement about the rules for trading in carbon credits.
> Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, said: “Governments need to completely rethink how they do this, because the outcome of COP25 is totally unacceptable.”
[]
> Geopolitical tension and the absence of leadership from the US and China, the world’s two biggest emitters, severely handicapped the negotiations, which descended into open bickering on the plenary floor during the final hours of the talks.
> The Paris climate accord, which aims to limit global warming to well below 2C, has been signed by 197 countries in the world, but the US is in the process of withdrawing from it and will leave the pact next November.
> The EU delegation said it was disappointed that the meetings failed to find agreement on carbon markets.
For the record, though, if you ever do decide to pay for news, FT is one of a few that are actually worth the money.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
I flagged this submission for that reason.
Government is 100% of the wrong place to solve this. And that's because they can't no matter what they do it's impossible for them to do that.
This can only be solved in the research field with better energy sources.
And it can be solved in the finance field with cheaper energy sources.
Government regulation cannot solve this.
In Germany the market prices for electricity go down but at the same time the residential rates go up massively. There are two reasons for that. Firstly coal plants can't throttle down but PV and wind farms get paid anyway through a surcharge. Secondly large industrial consumers are exempt from the surcharge. This means residential users are paying the electric bills of aluminum smelters, etc. In other words. The cheaper the electricity in Germany the higher the final price. Isn't that absurd?
The surcharge wouldn't be needed if there was a working CO2 tax or carbon trade system because all coal plants would be shut down and replaced by load following natural gas plants which only run when truly necessary.
The only thing that has made a real difference is switching from coal to gas in places like the UK. But even then gas heating in our homes is emitting more CO2 than any other sector.
Wind and solar are too intermittent to replace base load, there isn't enough cobalt in the world to build enough storage, there probably isn't enough uranium to switch everyone to nuclear.
I can't see people accepting a shift from an energy system based on stocks to one based on flow and the intermittency that comes with that. My neighbours go a bit bananas when the power is off for thirty minutes.
We really are fucked.
Electric cars are too expensive? Just build more of them and the price will go down. Battery storage is too expensive? Just build more and the price will go down. Renewables are too expensive? Just build more and the price will go down.
It's a matter of choosing the new technology and right now nobody is choosing. Lots of people are proud about polluting the environment and I don't think I can change their mind, the government can't. We all know what this means: nothing can.
The US, China, and India are not willing to commit.
So the rest if us might as well go home. I know its encouraging to pretend things are working. But they're not. The time for non binding commitments ended in the 90s. Now is (and has long been) the time for cold hard facts.
There should be no such "credits", just emissions reduction plans - and the states which should be required to reduce the most and the fastest are those which pollute the most per capita, and the most period.
Of course, this won't happen because the largest polluters are also the most politically powerful, so they rig things in their favor.
Let's name the names: China, US, India, Russia, Japan, Germany, Iran, South Korea, Canada, Brazil. https://www.countryaah.com/top-10-countries-that-contribute-...
What should be negotiable IMHO is:
* How to account for the unfairness in the fact that some countries got to pollute freely for a couple of centuries while others didn't get this "free pass" and are still behind in grid development. * The question of whether absolute pollution should count more than pollution per capita or the other way around. * The extent and the form of aid by richer/more industrially-developed economies should be committed to help with technology to poorer economies which already pollute a lot and will have difficulties adjusting independently.