Hacker News Reader

Comment by iguanayou | Hacker News Reader

1. Carbon tax 2. Cap and trade

The problem is NOT that there have been no good proposed policy solutions. The problem is that voters don't want them. This is why I'm pessimistic on the environment.

View on HN

Doesn't work. Because corporations find loopholes around the law to achieve an "equivalent" of carbon reduction, that doesn't actually reduce it, but still call themselves green. If anyone thinks that planting a few trees actually reduces carbon given how much the Chinese pump out, I have a bridge in Brooklin to sell you.

You can trivially set up a carbon tax that a majority of voters would vote for, simply give the money that you taxed back out equally among the population as a form of UBI.

We don't see these proposals because they are not proposals that the wealthy and powerful would benefit from.

Exactly. Making the whole "I don't trust the government to do something smart with my money" argument moot. It has been proposed, voters have seen the proposal, and it has been voted down.

Well this presumes two things, one, that there are no valid arguments against cap and trade, and two, that propaganda against cap and trade is not effective. But both are true. Plenty of people do oppose cap and trade simply because those influencing their political stripe loudly oppose it, and plenty of people have valid concerns about what the effects of such a scheme would be and potential downsides to it.

One particular argument would be that there would probably be all sorts of exemptions and subsidies so as to make it ineffective against the largest producers of CO2, which is a version of "I don't trust the government to do something smart with my money," making it not a moot point after all.

The wealthy and powerful have also ensured that this sort of thing would be controversial among the low income populations who would benefit the most of these policies. Tribal politics is the wedge that divides the lower classes and ensures there will never be a unified class based effort to uproot the profitable status quo enjoyed by the upper classes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com