U.S. Financial Regulator and Banks Urge Action on Climate | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Financial Regulator and Banks Urge Action on Climate

arstechnica.com

98 pointsPaulHoule39 comments

If only there was some part of the government or agency whose job it was to consistently keep tabs on how the environment is doing for the purpose of protecting it.

Snark aside (and putting on my cynic cap), I wonder if most of the institutions and independently wealthy have already planned for the worst case at this point. Owning property in in New Zealand looks better and better by the month/year.

Why New Zealand rather than anywhere else?

Location, stable government and real estate (ie asset parking) environment, ease of buying property as a non-resident.

Buying property on a small island to prep for climate changes seems... counter intuitive.

New Zealand is not a small island. It's bigger than the UK.

New Zealand also has a lot of relief. It is not an atoll which could be overrun by a 1 meter sea level rise.

Bugging out to New Zealand is a meme among rich techies: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-rich-new-zealand-doo...

It also has to do with mild weather, access to resources like water and arable land, and a stable society. Although their biggest weakness would be inability to defend itself due to low population versus, for example, China.

China takes over countries using financial pressure (either through aid or financing loans) and broad pro-China deals (universities not being able to speak of Taiwan as a country, etc). Their MO is not generally invasions, so worrying about them is not sensible.

>> But in order to mitigate climate change, the US—through Congress—needs to adopt a carbon pricing scheme that is "fair, economy-wide, and effective in reducing emissions consistent with the Paris Agreement."

That sounds like another plea for cabon credits and some kind of market for them - you know, so wallstreet can play middleman.

The only fair way is IMHO to tax any carbon based fuel coming into the country or out of the ground. Whomever uses it will ultimately pay the higher price for it. Anything else is just playing favorites. I'm not a fan of it BTW, just pointing out what a fair way to penalize cabon use would be.

>The only fair way is IMHO to tax any carbon based fuel coming into the country or out of the ground.

what about cow farts?

Are they not also carbon based fuels coming out of the ground? The farts are a byproduct of digested organic matter like corn and grass, and contain some unusable or "un-harvest-able" fuel(s)?

YKINMKBYKIOK

Taxing oil raises the cost of energy, feed, transportation and everything else in the meat supply chain. Less demand = fewer cow farts.

> The only fair way is IMHO to tax any carbon based fuel coming into the country or out of the ground. Whomever uses it will ultimately pay the higher price for it. Anything else is just playing favorites. I'm not a fan of it BTW, just pointing out what a fair way to penalize cabon use would be.

I don't really see how this is fair. the environmental impact of burning fossil fuels can vary a lot depending on how and where it is done. when an ICE vehicle burns fuel, the carbon is released directly into the atmosphere at ground level. an airplane that releases the same amount of carbon at a high altitude has a significantly greater warming effect. a power plant might burn a huge amount of fossil fuels, but recapture most of the carbon before it enters the atmosphere.

taxing the fuel itself has an appealing simplicity, but it creates a very crude incentive structure. in particular, it creates zero incentive to actually clean up emissions per unit fuel.

How many operating carbon capture plants are there, and what are the barrier to greater adoption?

What's not fair is countries facing fire, drought, and land loss because of other countries carbon pollution.

This is not pollution control. We need to stop mining carbon and burning it, and we need to stop doing almost all of it.

We should worry about plastics and fertilizers, not IC vehicles or electricity. Those are comparably easy to deal with.

The difficulty is accurately taxing the embodied carbon of imported non-fuel goods. Figuring out the carbon footprint of a barrel of oil relatively easy, but figuring out how much carbon was emitted to produce a shipping container full of electronics is not. This is important because if you underestimate you are effectively subsidizing foreign industry.

Not the OP, but I think what he meant was that the electricity that went into producing the container full of electronics will be more expensive depending on the way it was produced. If it was produced in a fossil-fuel burning power plant, then the producer will pay a carbon tax when they buy the fuel. This tax will cover the externality produced by the CO2 emitted during the electricity generation, and the manufacturer of the electronics does not need to bother with another tax themselves.

I personally think this makes sense.

What the OP did not mention is how do you give a benefit to those who contribute to removing CO2 from the atmosphere, for example for people who plant trees on their property. To me it's only logical that a tax charge for emissions should go hand in hand with a tax rebate for negative emissions. However, I'm not deeply immersed into this topic, I have no idea of the pros and cons of various approaches. I simply think that this simple idea makes sense.

Tax rebates are simple to corrupt.

The simplest, non corruptible method to reach the goal of reducing fossil fuel usage is to tax the fossil fuel itself.

How high does the tax need to be? Keep raising it until the effects of fossil fuels on climate change subside.

And this won’t ever happen because it will cause a decrease in perceived quality of life due to decreased ability to consume resources, and that’s not politically tenable.

All of this carbon offset and credit and rebate talk is useless since it won’t actually reduce overall consumption, but it is politically palatable as it just pretends to shift things around without sacrifice, much like recycling did.

> how do you give a benefit to those who contribute to removing CO2 from the atmosphere, for example for people who plant trees on their property.

You don't. Unless it's done at a large, industrial scale the effects of these efforts are negligible. There are always exceptions of course, like that guy in Texas who rehabilitated thousands of acres of land.

Not to mention planting trees on your property is its own reward. Trees are nice to look at, they give shade, hold topsoil, and create healthy ecosystems. They may even increase your property's value.

On the other hand, if we get good at carbon capture at scale (e.g. by harnessing un-storeable renewable energy) the money from carbon taxes should be used to pay for it.

An acre of trees absorbs on average the CO2 produced by two cars [1]. A typical American car travels about 12000 miles/ year and has an fuel consumption of about 24mpg, so two cars burn about 1000 gallons per year. For a carbon tax of $0.2/gallon [2], that's $200 per year. Currently you can buy forest land for less than $1000/acre e.g. [3]. An incentive of $200/year could make forest ownership one of the best investments available anywhere.

[1] http://www.tenmilliontrees.org/trees/

[2] https://www.resourcesmag.org/common-resources/calculating-va...

[3] https://www.landandfarm.com/property/Timber_Property_Surroun...

Nice analysis! Thank you!

> This is important because if you underestimate you are effectively subsidizing foreign industry.

I think the idea is that every country in the world taxes imported or mined carbon, so there's no escaping the taxes and no implicit subsidies. The ones that don't play get hit with heavy tariffs, sanctions, or trade embargoes.

That would be great, but under current WTO rules sanctions and trade embargoes are effectively illegal unless they are against North Korea, Cuba, or Iran.

There are precedents for pollution credit programs. I believe such a program has been credited with reducing acid rain in the U.S., for example.

Makes you wonder if any of the players mentioned here are involved. https://thegrayzone.com/2020/09/07/green-billionaires-planet...

Yep, as expected, they begin to care once it hits their bottom line.

1. They have mortgages in places like California that are burning up.

2. Note the CFTC and "banks" would be involved in trading of carbon credits so that's another interest they have in a solution.

I have to admit that I'm skeptical of carbon credits because they will be gamed by Enron-style traders and diverted towards things that look like they work, and away from things that really work.

For instance, some people claim you can absorb CO2 by grinding up Olvine rock and spreading it at the beach. Maybe it works. It's hard to measure because it happens over a wide area.

If you capture carbon from a fossil fuel power plant or biofuel facility or direct carbon capture you pump CO2 into a well and can measure it going in the same way people measured methane going out. That's for real, rock crushing less so, but if rock crushing appears to be cheaper Wall Street will crush rocks while the Earth burns.

any system can be gamed and any system will be gamed.

but! a system with these two assumptions built into it can still reach its goals. i don't know much about carbon credit proposals or working systems - i'm actually a fan of carbon tax and carbon dividend - but i know one such instance works in the EU and perhaps a different one can be designed to reduce carbon emissions despite being abused.

Carbon credits are bullshit, just like additional 10 cents for a plastic shopping bag at grocery stores. Consumers will easily swallow the costs and things will continue as usual, unless of course, carbon credits are actually used towards initiatives that move the entire planet towards sustainability.

A decade ago, you could buy these credits to offset your own carbon footprint with the promise that they would be used to support reforestation efforts across the globe. Years later I found out through a friend who would help charities that received those credits, that they would definitely plant trees, but the number advertised on the credits and the actual trees planted were different. Also, no one would take care of the trees for long and only few would survive.

Or the land is sold later for logging the trees...

Has the 10 cent surcharge on plastic bags not had an affect? When it was implemented in my area I saw most people switch to reusable bags over the course of a month, and many restaurants stopped giving out bags unless they were specifically requested.

The point of charging for plastic bags is not the money, it is to force store employees to ask people how many bags they need (since they are required by law to charge for it).

Many customers, with the most basic of reminders, will choose to skip the bag, or bring their own.

Sadly it is true, but one would think that longer term perspective would have made these conclusions sooner and allow better planning for how to deal with the financial costs.

That's ok, as long as something gets done. If their bottom line incentivizes action, then the economy is structured well and incentives are aligned.

The issue is that their bottom line was not impacted early enough.

Love the gaslighting here: the current predicament in CA and OR has nothing to do with climate and everything to do with incompetent forest management and logging bans. Yet if you read mainstream press (or listen to e.g. Obama) you'd never know.

It's both. The forest management issues mean there are more fires. Climate change means those fires tend to burn hotter and faster.

Strangely Canada didn't have any significant fire, while the last two three years there were, and the climate now it's even worse (we are closing in 10 years until we are wiped out).

This year there were less people camping and out in the woods, and not gender reveal party around here either.

> Climate change means those fires tend to burn hotter and faster.

Citation needed. :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com