> As far as bending the warming curve towards 1.5° C is concerned, I think policy and regulatory reform is currently a larger source of leverage than technology.
Refreshing to hear this from someone working in climate tech.
Refreshing to hear this from someone working in climate tech.
It might balance out in the big scheme of things, but it isn't going to be doing any favors to people who are already precariously balanced and lack the savings to make personal adjustments. You can be sure there will be mass protests if the price of gas, food, and electricity double (esp food in northern climates where transportation and refrigeration add a lot to produce and frozen goods as well as meats).
Nothing prevents the dividend from being offered upfront. It would be trivial for most governments to finance this.
Ask someone living paycheck to paycheck if they'd take $500 now in exchange for higher (but less than the $500 they get) costs on certain items. Most people living paycheck-to-paycheck are not the biggest consumers.
At a nominal price of $20/ton, a few things will go way up in price, but almost everything else will see at best a blip, with an added incentive to the producers to reduce the carbon content because that matters at industrial scale (company saves $3m over 30m units by switching to a non-petroleum glue whatever) not to an individual consumer (who would see a cost increase of 10¢).
They are a northern climate. There are no mass protests. Carbon emissions are going down.
Instead of asking people how they feel about a theoretical scenario, you can look at reality.
Rapid price inflation for staple goods will likely cause civil unrest either way. The only way to make a carbon tax politically feasible will be to slowly phase it in over many years so that people have time to adjust.
For example, "everyone" is laughing at Germany's super Energiewende that it is a expensive failure that has not managed to reduce Germany's dependence for coal at all. But then, if you have a look when Germany has built solar, it's share of the global new capacity at that time and compare that tho the learning curve and price development of solar, it is a bit difficult to conclude anything but Germany's policies have pretty much singlehandedly brought solar from laughably expensive novelty to something that actually can be competitive in certain markets. Then China continued from there, and now we are extremely close (if not already over) a tipping point where solar just keeps getting cheaper subsidized or not.
Now while I agree, that in the long term all energy should be from renewable sources, in the short term it is much more important to get those coal plants off the grid. Instead there were new ones being opened.
In the late aughts I changed my tune because coal is just too disastrous and indeed, people/govts werent motivated enough.
So while I understand the simple practicality of going nuke to get off coal, I also expect that most of the potential downsides of nuclear will become reality before people will be motivated enough to do anything about it.
CCS technology may be currently used to say "look, clean coal!", but it's still useful and important for a low-carbon future.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/feb/25/donald-trum...
What recent policies have been passed that you think should be lauded?
Unless we can point to a policy change then "Trump has to go for anything to happen" seems reasonable, doesn't it? If the gains are from coal's decline, it seems reasonable to be worried that won't be enough.
It happened under Trump's tenure due to the economics of coal power and wind, despite his campaign promises to prop up coal and the phase out of wind power subsidies.
The reduction isn't even close to the scale of the cuts required to make meaningful progress on climate.
As someone earlier in the thread said, look how much progress has been made under a hostile policy regime. Imagine if there was actually a carbon tax and oil subsidies were transferred to clean tech.
Which let's be real is his only platform, so I'm willing to grant it
The other point is this relies on fracking, and the carbon intensity of fracking depends on the level of escaped Methane. It can actually be worse than coal. And Trump has just reversed a lot of the regulation which prevented venting of Methane from fracking sites.
Someone in climate tech supporting forcing their tech onto consumers is refreshing? Seems absolutely normal.
People in climate tech are more about fundamentalist morality than improving the world through actual advances.