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Comment by zug_zug | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. I imagine as the extra added-cost of pollution gets funneled back to the producers, they will have a financial incentive to adjust their processes to pollute less. In turn consumers will be incentivized to buy products that create less pollution.

Also once companies are paying for these costs there will be lots of money to go around, suddenly the R&D budgets will be huge, which is a great thing.

To illustrate -- if you drive 15k miles per year the cost of "recapture" for your carbon on driving is $3,600 (@25mpg). How many more people would drive Tesla if the alternative was to pay $9 per gallon of gasoline? How many more people would buy hybrids?

[Please double-check my math]

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driving 15k miles @25 mpg = 600 gallons of gas (15,000 / 25)

gallon of gas has 19.60 lb co2 / gallon [1] = 11,760 pounds of co2 (600 * 19.6) = 5.88 tons (19.6 * 600 / 2000)

cost for clime works to sequester co2 is $600 [2] so total cost to sequester for the 15k is $3,528 (5.88 * 600)

cost to sequester per gallon is $5.88 per gallon ($3,528 / 600 gallons)

price of gas in NYC is $3.11 per gallon so new cost per gallon factoring in the current high cost of carbon capture is $3.11 base price + $5.88 to sequester = $8.99 per gallon

yeah your math seems great lol

assuming cost to sequester goes down to $100 per ton, the cost for 15k of driving at 25mpg would be $588 (5.88 * $100), cost to sequester per gallon would be $0.98 so the new price of gas in NYC would be $4.09 (3.11 + .98), actually not absurd given recent trends and probably not high enough to discourage people from driving

sources:

[1] https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php

[2] https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-dream-of-co2-air-capture-...

[3] https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/researchers-and-policymakers/ener...

thanks for plugging and chugging it all out.

carbon engineering's carbon capture technology is projected to be significantly less than $600 tonne, they say the plant they are building for occidental petroleum in texas will be profitable from 1) cost of avoided CO2 purchases (CO2 is used to pump oil out of the ground) and 2) california CO2 credits for "low carbon oil" which is between $175 and $200 USD/tonne [0].

so if carbon ends up at $200 per tonne instead of $100, cost per gallon would be $3.11 + $1.96 = $5.07. If you drive a lot probably enough to nudge you towards an EV!

[0] https://www.neste.com/investors/market-data/lcfs-credit-pric...

Good luck getting Congress to pass a tax increasing the price of gas by 1.33-3x. That's political suicide, even for Democrats. Directly fucks over the working class but corporate fleets can afford to pay the extra $$$ or switch to electric.

This is not out of line with the price of fuel in some countries already; I think it demonstrates that the technology is quite possibly on the edge of economic viability for closing the carbon cycle of gasoline, even if we don't get hundredfold improvements in the technology. That's pretty good news for everybody.

UK petrol is about £1.30/liter = $1.80/l = $6.80/US gallon. Not really enough to seriously deter driving yet.

The biggest problem with any cost-driven incentive is that it has the ability to fuck people over. If you make electricity too expensive you end up with fuel poverty. There is no way out of it. There is no other 'choice' that poor people can make. Same with water charges. What do you do if you can't afford your water bill?

But cars are different. For many people, driving is not essential. It should be a luxury to drive a huge hunk of metal around a smooth road. By right that shouldn't be affordable, given the current situation. We just got used to cheap cars and cheap fuel, and built our culture and our cities and our lives around that. (Yeah, I know, people who live in the country are married to their cars). If your country really pushes EV charge points and implements tax incentives on EV vehicles, then you are providing people with a way out of high carbon tax. And you need your PR campaign to be clear that people are getting a choice: high price fossil fuel or cheap EV. Because the chicken/egg here is that you won't get a government that'll make those changes until your convince people to vote for it. And people won't vote for poverty, but they will vote for options.

If you create a tax that disproportionately hits poor drivers, you can balance that out with redistributive taxes - and incentives for buying electric cars that mainly benefit poor people.

Currently most incentives for buying electric cars benefit the wealthy. For example in the UK, I can get 45% of my tax back through salary sacrifice on an electric car, whereas a person on basic rate only gets 20%. It should arguably be the other way around i.e. a "super deduction" for the poor, capped at basic rate relief for the rich.

A cost driven incentive can still be viable. It needs to be accompanied by practical replacement solutions. For example, if driving cars becomes too expensive for people, then public transport needs investments and needs to cover more ground, to help people out.

Yep. I think they need to implement a "Fuel cost equivalent tariff" on public transport. FCET because everyone switching from a car needs to do this gradually so you can't include the depreciation etc because they are sunk costs. It costs me ~£65 for 50l of fuel which gets me about 450-500 miles in my car. If I'm travelling alone I should be able to buy a walk-up train ticket for that price, with a 20% discount for pre-planning my journey. If I'm travelling with my family then group tickets should be discounted so each extra person is a nominal extra amount as long as we all travel together. Tickets should be integrated across all transport modes like they are in Switzerland.

The big problem with this, in the UK at least, is that the trains are already full even though they are much more expensive than this. We really need more capacity but the hugely corrupt debacle that is High speed 2 is going to turn people against building better public transport.

> But cars are different. For many people, driving is not essential. It should be a luxury to drive a huge hunk of metal around a smooth road. By right that shouldn't be affordable, given the current situation. We just got used to cheap cars and cheap fuel, and built our culture and our cities and our lives around that.

So you'll pay to bulldoze people homes and build massively dense downtown housing that offers a better quality of life than the suburbs?

In Sweden we're around the equivalent of 7.2 USD / gal, due to high taxes.

However, and I expect this to be the case in most European high-taxed countries, the taxes are just fed in to the general tax revenue of the government. Not ear marked for e.g capture programs.

These taxes do of course fund some inovation projects etc, but I think it would be a hard sell politically even here to direct all carbon-related taxes directly into buying Co2 capture.

For example, as renewables have grown larger in Sweden, the government has started taxing the production of solar power on larger installations (≈ roof of a warehouse), even if the energy is never sold/transmitted to the grid.

>That's political suicide...

>Directly fucks over the working class

From my experience of the U.S - number 2 is seldom the cause of number 1.

on edit: formatting

Indeed, market it as "making welfare queens pay their fair share" and we'd have it tomorrow

If we started doing that in 1990 or so, after the first couple of climate summits we could've spread out the change over two or three generations. Now it hurts a lot more. If we wait another ten years, it will be even harder.

Kick the can down the road. Climate, debt ceiling,....

Not if you used that money to directly transfer that wealth to working class. All the money they've paid would return to them, in addition to the money paid by those corporate fleets.

But, in USA, it would surely go to military.

That is why the proceeds of such a tax should be given back to the population directly. That way if your CO2 emissions are average, it's a net zero financially for you but you're incentivized to reduce your emissions as you could actually gain money if you go below average (in effect it would mostly be the rich that lose money as they're quite often the biggest CO2 emitters).

However the implementation of such a tax, although conceptually simple, is practically very complicated.

If you give it back to the population, then you can't use it to pay for sequestering. That prevents doing something about the problem, and just brings you back to "pay to pollute".

(Discouraging people from driving is not the point, if we have net zero CO2 people can drive as much as they want.)

Extraction and refining of oil is still quite polluting. The first step is still reduce

I personally disagree that's a good step. Sadly, I can't think of a good memorable three-worder involving "price in all external costs" and "stop moralizing at people". Increase, internalize, improve?

The reduce part is not that it is wrong to consume, there are many ways in which cars are useful, but if your purpose is to be "green" it is still the first step, for many people it is not an option and that is ok.

I mean, I don't think it should be up to individuals to be "green"; there's lots of individual choices but "price in the damage your actions cause" should not be one of them. And once environmental damage is correctly priced in, then reducing consumption is no longer green anyways, because the consumption is now carbon neutral.

There is an interesting discussion to have around whose behaviour is of an higher priority and/or which group has more blame, but regardless of that individuals can still contribute.

The problem isn't individual action, but focus on individual action as a substitute for government action.

>once environmental damage is correctly priced in, then reducing consumption is no longer green anyways, because the consumption is now carbon neutral.

Global warming is only a subset of environmental damage.

There's all kinds of other damage in the wake of over-consumption.

When you kill more trees than you grow back, the devastation comes much quicker than waiting for the whole world to get hotter.

Carbon can be looked at as only one material and IF it can be been made neutral in the face of rising or even curtailed consumption, that seems to be the pricing that can be correctly assessed to compensate.

To raise the ante and try to price in many other forms of environmental damage too, you're going to need a bigger bank.

Plus just to earn all that money to allow all that consumption leaves an additional trail of damage behind, with a departing path of financial acumulation leading off in the opposite direction.

And as we know, different currencies have different toxic footprints themselves, and that was before bitcoin which has gotten into a category of its own.

Gemstones and rare elements too, some are bloodier than others. Deaths here can occur faster and sooner than forests are dying.

To me this tends to indicate that reducing consumption will always be green.

Agreed. BUT if we price in the true cost of carbon at all levels it balances out. In a world we’re there is sufficient DAC you could charge the extractors and refiners and delivery companies and consumers. The price of a unit of gas goes way up at that point. Take the original commentor’s guess at $10/gallon - is the new cost $25 or more? I think we’d get to reduced consumption quickly.

Oh, that’s only net zero. In this fantasy we should also charge fossil fuel industries for past infractions too - maybe they need to pay an extra 20% for extra dac capacity.

There's still lots of pollution coming off of tires, but that's just a health & environmental hazard, not a climate hazard.

That happens whether you drive a tesla or not. Probably a lot more if you drive a Tesla. A Tesla Model X weighs 30% more than a BMW X3.

The carbon cost of 1 litre of petroleum is 2.4kg. You need to factor in the emissions through the entire production and distribution chain.

Not doing that is like comparing emissions to electric vehicles whilst assuming a carbon cost of 0 for the electricity.

...Including the production of the car itself. Buying a new EV every year has a huge co2 impact even if your mileage doesn't.

EVs' lifespan matters (I'm not sure how it compares to ICEs today): if after a year you then sell the car as used, that's a significant amount more efficient than assuming the car is destroyed each year.

I think this is an overestimate because DAC is so inefficient when there are so many sources of higher grade CO2 emissions, both natural and man made that could be captured well before DAC makes any sense. Why would we bother doing DAC when you could capture streams of nearly pure CO2 from factories or even volcanic seeps etc?

> if the alternative was to pay $9 per gallon of gasoline?

It's easy to forget how incredibly cheap gasoline still is in the US.

In Europe you expect to pay somewhere between $6 (Baltics) to $8 (Nordics).

Given the enormous budgetary excesses of the covid situation, one would only expect these prices to rise even further. Gasoline consumption is something a society generally want to discourage given the externalities involved.

This is a thing I don't get about climate politics in the Nordics. We have already implemented taxation that strongly disincentivizes a large source of CO2 emissions from businesses and private individuals. Gasoline is expensive here because we pay ~80% tax on it, not because it's expensive to ship. And granted, we do have very strong EV adoption to show for it.

But it's a very small step from here to an effective climate stategy that also inventivizes emission reductions everywhere else.

We should have a large-scale R&D program going to sequester CO2 for geological timescales, and pay for it using the existing gasoline taxes as well as an additional and gradually-increasing CO2 emission fee.

But instead this tax money goes towards increasing the number of people working in the public sector. You'd think this was a big talking point for the Greens, but those folks don't understand economics and focus all their efforts on trying to decommission the oil sector. I don't get it!

Wow. I recently got a car - first time in 10 years - and I used TeraPass monthly recurring to offset. Or so I thought.

Is there a reason the cost per tonne is so far off? Is terrapass just BS?

They say I think $5 per 1,000 pounds co2

https://terrapass.com/product/personal-carbon-offset-grouped

Terrapass and others offering these low prices are based on traditional offsets rather than carbon removal.

By this I mean they typically purchase and resell carbon credits generated by theoretically reducing emissions somewhere else - a common example to this is supplying more efficient fuel stoves to African communities. A credit is generated as theoretically there are less emissions now going into the atmosphere. This however does nothing to tackle the emissions from your car which remain in the atmosphere.

Carbon removal generally refers to these new technologies that actively capture and sequester CO2. These are currently immature and expensive but the result is "net-zero", if your car emits a ton, you remove a ton.

Some links for you:

Bloomberg dug a little into the forestation based carbon offsets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20xMbGkEIQI

[Disclaimer: I co-founded this] an alternative which aims to support a portfolio of carbon removals: https://carbonremoved.com

Thank you! I completely overlooked this difference.

That huge removal cost just shows how underpriced oil is given the externalities.

Yeah if you do the math and squint a little, virtually all of the economic value of the benefits of oil will be required to be repaid in order to undo the costs. I think over the long term e.g. Exxon is going to be a net-negative business.

Exxon in particular seems evil. I just some articles on Guyana check it out if you haven't seen it.

I hope we are successful in some of the ongoing litigation like cigarette companies.

Specifically for energy corporations I am fine with complete Gov. sanctions/high regulation. Similar to electric companies but strip all shareholder profit until it's all spent cleaning up the mess. Not sorry to be the AOC socialist left on this one lol.

Follow up question: I am looking at a vehicle that has a gas or PHEV option. The hybrid option is ~$9k more. I plan to own it for only 3 years to purchase a full EV, and I expect the $7,500 tax credit in the U.S. may not apply. So in effect - if I did removal (calculated at 3.2t tons/yr driving so $498 for removal).... wouldn't it be cheaper for me to $1,500 removal rather than purchasing a PHEV ($9k addl)?

I'm very skeptical that the cost would be that low.

The facility in this article claims it will be able to pull 4000 metric tons of CO2 from the air each year.

Per the EPA, the average US driver produces 4.6 metric tons of CO2 per year. Let's call it 4 for ease of calculation. That's 1000 cars negated.

How much does this facility cost to operate and what is the cost of depreciation each year? $3.6M sounds impossibly low.

[0] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...

> How many more people would drive Tesla if the alternative was to pay $9 per gallon of gasoline? How many more people would buy hybrids?

At current prices it's already economically viable to get a Tesla in many places.

> I imagine as the extra added-cost of pollution gets funneled back to the producers, they will have a financial incentive to adjust their processes to pollute less

I imagine the added-cost gets passed on to the consumer.

That doesn't take away the incentive, though. Anyone that can pass on less cost because of a better process now has a real competitive advantage, whereas today they can, what, virtue signal?

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