Sucks for everyone who has marginal incomes, but I'm sure we can make some adjustments to the safety net policies to mitigate that.
I’d rather governments use general taxation to subsidise deployment of PV (or research into superconductors and storage) than encourage higher prices — the rewards form research can bring benefits that make the cost worthwhile.
For emphasis: this isn’t a “no” — I expect it to still be part of the solution despite all that because all options take time to scale up and diversity is good — just that it isn’t a slam-dunk.
I agree that faster deployment of renewables and CO2-neutral energy does require high energy prices - however, it's not my decision to make whether that benefit is so desirable to justify the costs, it's up to the people in each specific country to decide - and taking into account the benefit to them specifically and the costs to them, not the global benefit and someone else's budget. And IMHO governments have not really asked them for a proper informed decision, it all has just-sort-of-happened without informed consent of the masses and they might just refuse that consent if the price rises sufficiently.
In some sense a clean environment and less dangerous future are "luxury goods" that societies and people want to buy if they can afford to, but should not be forced if they can't afford the expense.
Nah, people will do as they're told.
1. This choice gets made in whatever way does get (at least passive) consent of the general public;
2. The leaders try to make a different choice and get promptly replaced in the next elections with whichever populists promise to ignore the elites and roll back these choices;
3. The leaders make a different choice and violently enforce them in an authoritarian manner despite dissent. And IMHO the lifestyle changes required to stop global warming would be sufficiently large to cause meaningful mass dissent if enforced.
I don't see any fourth option - do you?
I hate to bring it as example, but everyone but a minority followed Covid guidelines, locked themselves home, lost their jobs, lived on savings. For the greater good. Those protesting were seen as idiots.
So, yeah, people will do as they're told.
Covid is a relevant example, and IMHO it quite clearly showed the limits of how much people were willing to follow guidelines even in the presence of immediate threat with clear obvious results happening right now. If you would be asking something comparable to Covid restrictions so that in 30 years perhaps the impact would be lower... (the delay in time, the uncertainty of impact...) IMHO Covid experience shows that people simply won't accept that.
The people who can least afford to pay for clean energy etc are the ones who will also be most impacted by heat waves, declining air quality, and natural disasters.
So it's a similar "luxury good" as "functioning healthcare".
...and buy food to eat...
...global warming is something for future-you to care about.
But I don't think that qualifies "adequate dental care" or "maintaining a healthy weight" (two problems frequently prioritized below this month's rent) as luxuries. Not only are they something everyone should have, deferring attention to those things is a net cost for everyone in the end (sufferers are miserable, society pays). This is why health insurance has started subsidizing preventative care. Climate change is a similar can of worms.
If you have enough money, you can insulate your house, build geothermal heating, solar heating+power, and all that stuff. At that "richness level", a power bill increase is a negligable cost. If you're really poor, power bill increases mean choosing between freezing at home or eating. I pay ~45eur monthly for power (i get heat from elsewhere), and doubling that to 90eur would mean one less aliexpress toy for me. It would also mean around 10 days of cheap food for someone poor.
Basically, rich can afford to be green, but forcing green policies impacts poor the most. Ban non-eco cars? Sure... someone rich already has a car with low exhausts to pass the bar, and they will replace the car for a new one, even cleaner in a few years... poor people have an old beater with a shitty engine, burning oil, and a new eco policy means, that they have no way to drive to work anymore.
If a person can't afford adequate dental care, they usually don't sacrifice their rent and food to get it, they generally do without, even knowing that it would cause their future self much suffering. The same applies for global warming. As you say, the people who can least afford to pay for clean energy etc are the ones who will also be most impacted by heat waves, declining air quality, and natural disasters - and that's it, they will choose not to pay for clean energy despite the potential of being impacted by heat waves, declining air quality, and natural disasters some decades later. That's the choice they are going to make because that's the reasonable choice in their situation, they can't afford to sacrifice today for the sake of tomorrow.
My presumption is that "leads us all to doom" is a slight exaggeration and rather we would seeing "merely very bad" consequences (i.e. they're something for which we should be willing to pay a lot but not something to be prevented at literally any cost) that are furthermore very unequally distributed.
And the result of this are populations who would suffer a lot but can't afford to fix the issue, and there are other populations who can afford to spend resources on a better tomorrow, but for those groups perhaps it might be more efficient to allocate that money to mitigating the local consequences (e.g. flooding protection, urban redesign, restructuring of agriculture and pest control) instead of slightly slowing down (since they can't prevent it) the global warming as such. And, crucially, there's no shared understanding of these choices and tradeoffs among the people who could/should/would allocate these resources.
What I read in your comment is that the people who can afford to fund the changes ("who aren't in those circumstances") have a moral imperative to fix this for everyone. That seems desirable, but IMHO unrealistic; both because those people are a minority and can't fix the global issues if the developing world continues to develop and grow emissions; and also because those people (on average) won't be willing to sacrifice their own welfare (e.g. reducing it to global median) in order to fix the global issues; we're far from a post-scarcity world and every country, including the richest, still has a multitude of local problems that scream for funding.
While I sympathize with this view on a certain level, applying it to policy consistently and literally is a likely path towards chaos and immense death and suffering 70 years from now. That's a high cost to pay to consider climate policies an optional luxury good.
I'm increasingly convinced that bribing part of the voters with some sort of climate tax dividend is a sensible policy to keep society moving towards climate gas neutrality.
I certainly agree with the view that all climate policies are worthless if they don't take into account real-world considerations such as free will and what significant parts of society are able/willing to afford.
It's painful to watch this slow-motion tragedy play out. Certainly interested in hearing suggestions for improving it.
It's not really a bribe. If running your leaf blower pollutes the air that others breathe, is a (tiny) payment from you to those people not simply compensation for (tiny) harm you've caused? A carbon tax dividend simply manifests this concept (though aimed at carbon instead of pm2.5)
It's always seemed like a really promising policy that drives many of the right incentives, but getting it passed seems impossible.
Countries often are willing to bribe part of the voters to make some universal policies tolerable, having internal transfer payments for the benefit of the country as a whole.
The world is (IMHO clearly) very, very limited in its willingness to bribe part of foreign voters to make some global policies tolerable, having international transfer payments for the benefit of the world as a whole. There are some examples, but they're very limited in scale compared to intra-country wealth transfers.
It's plausible to convince voters for some reallocation between themselves, even if many specific voters would not individually benefit - but it's a hard sell to convince voters to assign significant resources (as opposed to current international aid/charity) to primarily benefit people in another country, which IMHO seems to be necessary because there's so big country-to-country variation in the actions needed to reduce global warming, the ability to afford these actions, and the severity of local consequences of global warming.
In this case, energy prices are (partially) high because of deployment of renewables (and not nuclear)
>Sucks for everyone who has marginal incomes, but I'm sure we can make some adjustments to the safety net policies to mitigate that.
When people complain about policies that screw the middle class this is exactly the kind of stuff they are talking about. The poors scrape by with their vouchers. The middle class flounders until they're poor enough to qualify for the vouchers. Energy, education, healthcare, housing, etc. etc. etc. regardless of the sector the effect is the same.
People have a habit of voting against people who screw them once they figure it out.
Burning fossil fuels might be unsustainable on a 50yr timeline but squeezing people financially is unsustainable on a 5yr timeline that gets us the worst of both.
Also keep in mind that my country has an annual national budget of $35,000 per capita, one third of which goes to welfare programs. We practically have a basic income program going already.
We're not totally insulated from the forces that besiege the middle class, but I'm pretty sure we're mitigating them as well as anyone. Would love to hear your suggestions on what policies would do better, assuming an intention to prevent catastrophic global climate change.
So some grandma with her 3 bar electric heater is paying some token amount for her usage over what is deemed 'baseline' but then crypto miners or industry is effectively subsidising everyone and also incentivised to reduce usage more heavily.