Global rich must cut their carbon footprint 97% to stave off climate change
cbsnews.com
cbsnews.com
Most HN readers are likely in the global top 10% or will be within a few years of a tech-related career. Many will be in the global 1% simply by saving for retirement over time.
This study refers to the "global rich", but that means it's referring to most of us.
I paid my co2 for 2 people from and back Germany Japan.
200$
That's nothing.
Will this create a hard barrier or do I need to stop flyibg?
Will we all accept to fly less? And consume much less?
Somehow I doubt it and will prepare myself the worst
I'm sure you pointed it out with good intentions, but it's fairly obvious why wealth and income are completely orthogonal when it comes to CO2 emissions.
[1] https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us/en/reports-research/g...
Let's first implement carbon tax with actual teeth, and go from there. And please no talk of "Ahh but what about America/China/India/Global rich/Corporations/whatever?" For god's sake, America can start first. Or China can start first. Or we can all finger-point each other and merrily claim "I'm not gonna do anything until that guy moves first!" while the world is heating up.
The total water usage of residents is < 0.2% last year, still they say "conserve water" and waste money on public service announcements etc... businesses, govt, industrial use is the other 99.8% and it's just business as usual for them....
Using it to transition our economy to carbon neutral and bringing back manufacturing? Sure. Financing ever ballooning bureaucrats pension funds? No thanks.
I mean, if a person is so poor that they are emitting less than the average amount emitted before the industrial revolution, then yes, maybe they should come out ahead. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're not aiming at a comfortable rate of adding carbon to the atmosphere, we actually have to stop increasing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
The goal is reducing carbon emissions, not paying for emitting them. Stricter emission limits, and heavy fines/less subsidies for the biggest offenders would do wonders in this regard.
(i agree penalizing individuals for not choosing expensive cars/stuff seems cruel)
> V. To maximize the fairness and political viability of a rising carbon tax, all the revenue should be returned directly to U.S. citizens through equal lump-sum rebates. The majority of American families, including the most vulnerable, will benefit financially by receiving more in “carbon dividends” than they pay in increased energy prices.
* https://www.carbonpricingleadership.org/news/2019/1/17/forme...
Co-signers include the then-former Federal Reserve chairs: Greenspan, Bernanke, Volcker, Yellen. Plus a bunch of Nobel laureate economists (Fama, Schiller, Scholes, Sharpe, etc).
An alternative market-based™ approach would be cap-and-trade, which was done under Bush41 for acid rain (and which California is doing for its carbon emissions IIRC).
[1] https://www.clcouncil.org/media/2017/03/The-Conservative-Cas...
Carbon emissions are simple. We're digging stuff up, and putting it into the air. Dig up less and start putting stuff back into the ground. It's possible to get to negative carbon emissions without making overly harsh cuts on consumption. For example, flying releases 1/4 tons of CO2 per hour. BECCS negative carbon emission prices vary, but I've seen estimates at $200 per ton on the high side. This means you'll add $200 to the operating cost for a carbon neutral four hour flight, which sounds extremely doable to me.
If you replace a large number of ICE cars with EVs getting all their electricity from a coal or natural gas power plant, it can still be a big win because all the fossil fuel burning for all of them is now in one fixed location instead of a large number of mobile locations. That gives you a lot more flexibility is adding system to capture the emissions, and more flexibility to upgrade as future, better, systems are developed.
Then the bottom 50% who collectively emit 7% could triple their emissions.
Is it me, or is 100% - 15 + 7*3 > 100?
Either the UN report is not talking about reducing CO2 emissions or the reporter greatly misunderstood it.
Later the reporter puts great emphasis on airplane travel almost to the point of saying that just cutting that alone would be enough - yet airplane travel (all of it) is 2.5% of emissions.
This article pretends to be about CO2, but is really about inequality.
> Is it me, or is 100% - 15 + 7*3 > 100?
You're counting the 7% too many times.
If the 7% were tripled it would be 21%, which is an increase of 14%, which roughly corresponds to the reduction of 15%.
100% - 15 + 7*2 = 99.
So given that the net results of this shuffle is zero, I guess that confirms that this article isn't about CO2, it's about inequality.
Instead maybe the rich could ride-share on boeings where they have a little more security and privacy and get first class to themselves or something....
This is misleading. 2020 saw a 7 percent drop from fossil emission levels in 2019 [1]. That is a huge number YoY which only exposed mass consumerism as the true culprit for the increase in CO2 emissions. Not to mention that China and India are the number one polluters and as usual the UN and other supranational organization will look the other way. Goes to show how our central planners are simultaneously waving the contradictory specters of global warming and deflationary economics.
[1] https://earth.stanford.edu/news/covid-lockdown-causes-record...
US: 16t per capita
China: 8t per capita
India: 2t per capita
I think it is pretty clear who is fucking things up right now. Yes, there are a lot of Indians, but that only means that the US (and their rich peers) have to move even further to stop being the bad guy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti... [2] https://ibanplastic.com/top-10-most-polluted-rivers-in-the-w...
Concrete production also takes a lot of energy. Based on the current costs of other building materials in North America I doubt we've slowed that down either.
Even if everyone in the top global 1% was driving electric cars right now we'd still be contributing a lot to CO2 emissions in other ways.
Well, what are they shipping? Goods that supply the consumerist chain at every level. We definitely did buy significantly less given that money velocity has plummeted in 2020, and I would argue this was reflected in the global shipping industry slowdown.
>Based on the current costs of other building materials in North America I doubt we've slowed that down either.
Current costs reflect the reopening boom, not last year's slowdown which witnessed a commodity drawdown!
Globalization as always seems to cause a lot of major pains for the world. Global Warming, lower wages in the USA, legal sweat shops in other countries, etc...
2. Kill 97% of humans (or whatever percentage, as that’s not what the headline actually means)
3. Geo-engineering to deal with the heat, but keeping all the cognitive impact of the CO2
4. Invent something to suck CO2 out of the air so cheaply that it can be cracked into the carbon-rich fuels people want to burn for a lower cost than just digging it out of the ground
"All carbon credits on the Cool Effect platform are from carbon projects that have been certified by one of the major international carbon credit standards, such as The Gold Standard, Verra or the Climate Action Reserve."
Ultimately you have to trust an external organization like that.
97% reduction might be enough? Dunno, but I can believe it.
Star Trek IV was prescient. Whales could save the world!
EDIT: of course reality is more nuanced:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.9b06252
This study is about fast-moving consumer goods, but (quote):
> Hiselius et al. argued that consumers who frequently shop online make the same total number of trips to shops as consumers who do not
Do you have any idea of how many emissions are caused by people driving 'across town' to buy very little? What about people who drive to the store to buy one thing? How about the air conditioning in the mall?
Warehouses are much more efficient places to store things than malls and stores.
Consumers are very bad at logistics, whereas logistics companies (like couriers) are very efficient at logistics.
The narrative conveniently shifts from focus on countries' industrial activities and ecological policies to ... of course, a focus on individual wealth and "inequality". I guess the inequality angle sells more ads these days; plus, it's so Trump-like to criticize nations, so let's not do that, right?
Can you name a developed country with strong policy about factory CO2 emissions?
Compare those to that of India, China, ...
Edit: maybe not https://www.eenews.net/stories/1063727659
> The Clean Air Act sets national air quality standards to lower pollutants that cause smog, acid rain and other health dangers. It's never been used for greenhouse gases, but environmental groups now hope EPA might finally use it after ignoring the option for 11 years.
One of these seems more dishonest than the other.
If you hold them responsible, whatever that means, they're almost guaranteed to pass on the extra costs to the consumer, leading to reduced demand and less utility distributed to the end recipient.
While it sounds better to hold a mega-corporation responsible rather than the average consumer, the end result is that the consumer ends up taking a cut either way, either through paying more for the same good or reducing their consumption.
It's a great example of bikeshedding the problem, while the world heats up.
This is precisely the point. Let's face it, most people will buy what's bad for the environment if the thing is convenient. If the thing is no longer offered, or too expensive, they will pay the premium or buy something else.
We can relearn to live without fresh fruits in winter, or cheap Asian clothing. It will be a step backwards for the comforts of our modern world, but also a step backwards from worldwide disaster.
Mature forests also release methane, which is 25X worse a greenhouse gas than CO2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Vesta
If it's true they could capture carbon at a cost of $10/ton by weathering rocks it should be much more efficient than trees. It also de-acidifies the oceans.