U.S. has entered unprecedented climate territory
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Even if the U.S. and the EU immediately stopped emitting 100% of their CO2, would it have any real effect on climate change? China would make up the difference within a decade or two. The entire continent of Africa is ready to industrialize, and its population is projected to decuple to 10 billion by 2050.
I don't blame people for being skeptical of the idea that America investing in green energy will save the world. It's a drop in the bucket.
I don't see a difference between taxing CO2 and giving benefits to CO2 free products.
The difference is that taxing something means less people are likely to buy it and when they do we make money, while giving a tax break make the product more competitive while costing us the income we might have had. One is a carrot, the other is a stick. It might not matter on income in the end but it will help push for greener products while taking the high road.
- Manufacturing in the states/EU where pollutant levels can be regulated is a good idea.
- Reducing consumerism as a culture would be useful.
Both of these go against trends (many in technology). Less consumerism means less stuff which is something wall street and SV are both pushing for. Moving to a service economy has been classified as a higher level than one with manufacturing. In the gamification metrics it would be to go backward.
Maybe US could use it.
They could lead by example like EU tries.
Instead US decided leaving Paris agreement that was not even a binding agreement was the best idea.
China are not going to pay for fixing our pollution going back a hundred years. We are or China will just turn a deaf ear on our talk.
China is increasing their pollution. The issue is around leadership. How can the US lead China to lower pollution levels, something they are currently increasing?
The question on how to lead them doesn't point fingers. It doesn't ask China to cleanup any past mess done by others. Bringing this up avoids dealing with the very difficult issue of... how do outside parties lead China to be more environmentally friendly when they are increasingly going in the opposite direction.
If I could donate money and remove X amount of CO2 pollution from the US or X+10% from China with the same amount I would not care at all about national borders. Pollution doesn't. Nationalism does. Technology transfer for greener technology at a discount would help a lot more than trying to get some newer SUVs on the road in the States.
Btw. stating that China is "increasingly going in the opposite direction" is not fairly stating the situation. China is doing a lot better than most in many areas if you compare apples to apples. The main drive for the increase is the increase of people having access to something akin to what we have (smartphones, cars, etc). That a population being lifted out of poverty is polluting more than earlier isn't a surprise. They pollut more because they need more powerplants, more cars are on the road, etc. Not because the don't try to build efficient powerplants and don't try to tax old dirty cars.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipVxxxqwBQw
There are multiple view points. The country with the largest current annual total emissions is China with 27-30% and the US with 15% (see 2m10s).
The country that produced the most CO2 in total historically which got us to this point of climate change (see 3m30s), were US first at 25% of historical emissions, and the EU in second at 22%, and China in third with 13% of historical emissions. India, all of Africa, and all of South America each had 3% of historical emissions.
Then there's per capita emissions (see 5m10s of the video).
So which of these three metrics should be used? Or should it be some other metric or a combination?
Also probably worth noting that China seems to have peaked in coal plants. They've built too many already, but hopefully it should be going down now.
Of course, that involves not having spent three decades inculcating paranoid conspiracy theories in the American public. Instead, we can move on to stage 5 climate denialism, "Well, it's too late to do anything about it now".
I just drove my campervan from Seattle to Bay Area. I took a lot of back roads (the tiny white lines on Google maps that are mostly dirt roads).
ALL the rivers are dry. ALL the lakes are low. There is tons of fire scars from last summer. It is clearly going to be another terrible fire season.
For example, I know some people who love and want to preserve the great outdoors. They don't like litter and they want to treat the land well. A bunch of them happen to have supported Trump and Republicans. So, against their normal flow they argue against climate change. It's easy to get them to want to see change in fishing (over fishing and dragging nets is damaging coral reefs). It's hard to get them to get them to close on climate change.
How we treat people makes a difference. It's helped fuel the people fighting against discussing or dealing with climate change.
This argument that green energy creates new jobs... is this not a version of the broken-window fallacy?
A broken window fallacy would be more like “Let’s adopt this new green energy because it is currently less efficient on a cost basis and so will create new jobs”
Or saying “green energy won’t cost anything because it will create new jobs”. Some people may be saying that one, but I think most people spouting the jobs line are trying to build political goodwill on places currently dependent on carbon jobs.
However, the coal plant is not perfectly good -- it has a massive amount of externalities that outweigh its benefits.
Can you support this claim?
So which is better, Hydrocarbon Power or Poor People?
Forgive me for being facetious, but to make my position more clear: I think electrifying the country has had demonstrable benefits to our society. To claim the costs outweigh the benefits is dubious and requires support.
1) Coal pollution kills 10,000 people a year, most of them poor because no rich person would live close to a coal plant. So that's a massive cost weighing heavily on the benefits of coal electrification.
2) Wind & Solar power are cheaper than coal, and not just by a little bit. So much so that in some places the capital and operating costs of wind and solar are cheaper than just the operating costs of coal. In those places abandoning the coal capital is still a win.
3) Much of the capital costs of a coal plant are in it's steam plant and in its grid interconnects. That makes them superb places to turn other heat sources into electricity and great places to inject non-heat sourced green electricity into the grid. So we don't lose all the capital investment into our coal plants.
4) mitigation costs of a tonne of CO2 at $50-$300/tonne make it a no brainer. adaptation costs for climate change would be even higher.
Bill Gates argues your point very strongly in his book. Before he was a climate change activist he was an activist for the health and welfare of the global poor. He understands the importance of electricity to the global poor and firmly rejects any solution that stops the progress of getting it to them.
Particularly, what are the adaptation costs?
Mitigation costs are expenses to prevent climate change.
Adaptation costs are expenses incurred because of climate change. Some of them are relatively easy to calculate like $200B to build a sea wall for New York City. Some of them are more handwavy -- what are the costs of mass migration? Most of these costs are incurred by farmers.
"More jobs" for the same production of goods/energy is less efficient and produces less total prosperity. You're better off using the most efficient means of production, and letting the other people produce something else of value.
Perhaps... The moneyed participants in the Renewable Energy industry are economic frontrunners - preparing for what they see is an inevitable future of expensive hydrocarbons. While the Green Jobs are less efficient today, they speculate they will become more efficient tomorrow, and make them all rich. But this is hardly a marketable proposition to the millions of taxpayers who are being asked to stabilize their less-efficient market offerings, and so baser arguments are made.
"Job creation on this scale and at this pace is not without precedent. The U.S. followed avery similar path in mobilizing for WWII. Winning the war for the Allies had a total cost ofaround 1.5 1939 GDPs. Transitioning to a completely decarbonized energy system probablyhas a cost closer to just 1 2019 GDP of $22 Trillion.
Recognizing the terrifying realities on the front lines of battle, and the deprivations at home, is this a fair comparison?
"In the most simplistic analysis, only considering jobs in the energy industry, we cansee that decarbonization will produce at steady state a few millions more direct jobs thanwhat we are doing today with fossil fuels. In a more complete economic analysis based onthe typical methodologies for modeling economy-wide job creation we see the net creationof around 23 million jobs at the peak settling at around 4-6 million more jobs at steadystate (2040 and beyond)"
4 million net jobs represents an increased cost of $200 billion per year for the same level of service ($600/yr per US citizen). The article estimates the capital costs of decarbonization to be approximately $3 trillion ($9,000 per US citizen).
Very good. We have a baseline understanding of the real costs of the project. Now what is the cost of the null alternative? Could we realized a decarbonized society without government intervention? Is this the most efficient use of capital?