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Comment by _Microft | Hacker News Reader

Someone submitted this a few posts earlier: "The Amazon is turning into savannah – we have 5 years to save it", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29540946

Two sides of the same coin but the groundwater problem seems easier to solve. Not because it is technically easier but because the incentives for (rich countries) seem to be a lot stronger. Preventing the own area from flooding is way less abstract than indirectly caused deforestation somewhere in the world, with effects that will be felt only years or decades into the future.

Without wanting to highjack this submission (the Amazon submission didn't gain traction, unfortunately) but any ideas how this problem could be solved and how one could contribute to a solution?

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Capitalism and Free Market.

On an individual basis, apart from zero-cost sustainable habits, if you are capable, become a master of science, attempting to solve energy, material, carbon and climate issue at a physics level. If you are a craftsman, observe all the day-to-day activities of humans, tinker/hack and attempt to solve the same workflows more sustainably.

If you have a solution either through hacks or science, you'll have unbelievable amount of capital coming to you to scale your solution. Capitalists will be tripping over themselves to hand you money.

Here's what will 100% not work -- Activism or Trying to 'Policy' out of your way of Climate Change problems.

Also, no government will ever fund your crazy little idea that has 0.0001% chance of succeeding with 10000x impact. Here's who may fund it -- your favorite evil Billionaire.

Markets and capitalism are part of the solution, of course, but you absolutely do need policies to direct all that energy, at a high level.

Absent "policies" and enforcement, the cheapest way for a factory to dispose of waste is to dump it in the river. Same thing applies to CO2: dumping it in the atmosphere is cheap right now because the policies to deal with that externality aren't quite there.

An obvious example of a policy that might help would be a carbon tax that makes more carbon-efficient things more economically appealing.

Carbon tax gets proposed often, but it does not work on its own as a singular policy. Existing implementations of this see the money raised by the carbon tax diverted to equally environmentally costly ventures. There really is no easy way to incentivize a society driven by capital to be environmentally responsible because capitalism necessitates a near-sighted and self-centered approach to these things.

Take the focus on quarterlies- a company may be doomed long term by the decisions made in the present, but as long as they reflect positively in the quarterlies the people making the decisions stand to gain significantly more than they will eventually lose when the company collapses. Its this mindset that we have to fight if we hope to effect any real limit to climate change.

There's no real incentive when climate change occurs on the scale of decades, and anybody with the power to change it thinks (and is thus affected) on the scale of years.

The reason carbon taxes work is because the upper echelons of society are responsible for far, far more carbon dioxide and pollution than the overwhelming majority of the world's population.

Despite what we've been told, the planet won't be saved by worker-bees biking to work. It'll be saved by not having the ultra-wealthy flying everywhere in their private jets, and not spending tens of millions of dollars on multiple homes that are lavishly equipped / use massive quantities of energy to heat and cool / have armies of people keeping them clean and the grounds manicured.

I'm not here to defend the ultra-wealthy but what you're saying doesn't pass the sniff test. Aviation accounts for just 12% of global CO2 emissions and households account for 21%. Obviously, a very small percentage of that could be attributed to the ultra-wealthy flying around in private jets and owning multiple mansions.

On the other hand, a reasonable argument against the wealthy elite would be that they are likely to have the most significant influence on preempting policy that could help deal with climate change. They would have the most vested interest in maintaining the status quo, due to their positions at the head of industry, and their children would suffer the fewest consequences of unmitigated climate change.

But then again, there is also a significant number of voters, at least here in the United States, who aren't going to get behind any policy that may cost jobs and increase energy prices in the immediate term. And then there's China, putting out 27% of total global carbon emissions.

So as convenient as it would be to just blame the rich, climate change is simply too broad an issue to put on the shoulders of any one group or entity, even China.

The nice thing about a carbon tax is we don't have to figure out exactly who is doing what. We just tax it and let things sort themselves out.

Things don't just sort out though. Where does that money go? If it goes back into a project that is equally as environmentally destructive, you've just laundered the carbon. Given that the institutions responsible for implementing and enforcing a carbon tax are inextricably linked to the institutions producing some of the highest sources of carbon pollution, I find the proposition that a carbon tax will sort anything out to be unsettling.

https://clcouncil.org/economists-statement/

Carbon tax is not being proposed on its own, it's meant to be combined with:

- Paying out ~100% of the take equally per-person to make it so it helps rather than hurts the poorest, a "carbon dividend". Poor people use less carbon on average (directly+indirectly) than wealthy people, so they will usually be net beneficiaries.

- Applying an equivalent tax on imports from countries that don't impose a similar tax, called a Border Carbon Adjustment, to prevent domestic manufacturing from being disadvantaged (and actually, it should give domestic manufacturing a boost, since manufacturing locally should be more efficient and hopefully include more green energy in its mix). In the cases where the carbon generation isn't known, due to being unaudited, the maximally pessimistic value can be applied, to encourage companies to audit their supply chain.

> Paying out ~100% of the take equally per-person to make it so it helps rather than hurts the poorest, a "carbon dividend". Poor people use less carbon on average (directly+indirectly) than wealthy people, so they will usually be net beneficiaries.

I think there's an argument that this is impossible to sustain, politically. Once there is a huge new tax, it will be too tempting to redirect growing portions of that funding to other projects. California, for example, has an energy rebate, but the money has also been diverted to bail out the high-speed rail project, for example, and if the state faced a fiscal crisis who knows where the money would go?

> Applying an equivalent tax on imports from countries that don't impose a similar tax, called a Border Carbon Adjustment, to prevent domestic manufacturing from being disadvantaged ... to encourage companies to audit their supply chain

Not that I'm opposed to the cause or aligning incentives in general, but practically, this just seems flat out impossible to implement in any way that has teeth.

Do we punish poor countries to not destroy our local business, or do we let them pollute to not further impoverish them (in which case they will just start doing carbon tax arbitrage)? Both solutions suck, but with different US demographics which makes the local politics tricky even when everyone agrees on terminal values.

Of course, the real elephant in the room is China! China will never let auditors hurt a local business besides occasionally destroying a Jack Ma. The company doing the manufacturing has an enormous incentive to lie since they get to pocket the difference (minus payoffs), the auditor has an incentive to lie as otherwise they would be fired/imprisoned/social-decredited, and the government has and will continue to lie/cheat/steal to protect domestic business. When we inevitably have incontrovertible, unignorable proof they are lying and lied for the last N years, do we start a trade war after local manufacturing has been destroyed and we are fully reliant on their goods? Do we just start a trade war up front to price in the lying from the get go which looks indistinguishable from massive tariffs... in any case, China won't retaliate for what reason?

> ...the maximally pessimistic value can be applied

Consider how truly feckless the US/WHO has been in addressing China on the now probably probable lab leak! There have been no consequences for refusing to cooperate in the investigation of the origins of a disease that has done trillions of dollars in damages and killed 5 million people (China threatened to withhold medical supplies at the start of the pandemic, so it goes, and its probably not within the interests of our own elites, either). Even if you think China has the same goal of reducing climate change, they will still keep two sets of books (or more!).

Anyway, this is a sort of visibility/legibility problem into other countries that feels really hard to solve politically. Every local actor is strongly incentivized to defect which makes the system untenable locally. It reminds me of tax collectors in medieval Europe, except, you know, it would be for the whole world.

Very good points about the political and practical difficulty. And you’re right that there would be large incentives to cheat and lean on your auditors. I don’t have a ready answer for that part of the problem, but I think it’s worth trying to start implementing regardless, because it’s the only proposal I’ve seen that I think has a chance of altering behavior enough to hit our carbon targets - we need to start pricing in these externalities and letting the market adjust toward better solutions. In the beginning, the $/ton would be minor, and would escalate over time, which would give us time to build out the infrastructure and solve other issues before the incentives to cheat got really large. And the foreknowledge of the schedule would allow for investment to anticipate needs.

Or perhaps we need to wait a bit longer for the pain to really start being felt broadly, and then we can finally get on with doing what we know we need to do.

Carbon tax works fine if politians are willing to stick to it.

First set some goals and make sure that those goals need to be met. For example, 0 net CO2 emissions in 2050, 50% less than 1990 emissions in 2030.

Then announce that each year, CO2 tax will be set to have effect. I.e., plot how to go from today to 2050, how much CO2 emission is allowed for each year and an estimate what to CO2 tax will be.

The CO2 can just be a general tax, and income tax can be reduced to compensate. No need for the government to spend all of it on new technology. Of course, some programs to develop markets may help.

When CO2 costs are more or less predictable, companies will quickly figure out ways to avoid CO2 emissions.

There is one big if, if the government cannot find a way to grand permits for green energy, transmission of green energy, etc. then the standard of living may quickly go down.

Property rights, one of the bedrock principles of capitalism, easily handles externalities.

Dumping waste/co2 is a violation of someone else's property rights. Try dumping waste into your neighbor's property and see what happens.

The reason why externalities happen is because government is not enforcing property rights

Uh, how do you measure where CO2 is being dumped and whose property it is when, say, someone is driving around?

And who does all that measuring?

It's easy to calculate Co2/Mile for a given Car make/model.

Essentially, it's Carbon Tax.

==Here's what will 100% not work -- Activism or Trying to 'Policy' out of your way of Climate Change problems.==

Capitalism and Free Market are solutions today exactly because we have aligned our "policy" to make clean energy more attractive to capitalists. People quickly forget policies like the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 [1] which invested $80 billion in clean energy. Tesla might not exist today if the DOE didn't loan them $465 million as part of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 [2].

[1] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/0...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/id/100759230

It's delusional to think Tesla wouldn't have existed without government help.

Tesla took a cheap government loan when it was available.

Do you really think, Musk wouldn't have raised the piddly $500 Million from on his multiple silicon valley buddies? (including Thiel, Page)?

The $465 million loan was given in April 2010. Tesla IPO'd in in June 2010 at a $1.7 billion valuation [1]. Maybe someone else would have given them the low-interest loan, we'll never know. We do know that this loan and the government subsidized EV tax credits helped them weather some very rough cashflow years.

[1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/tesla-10-anniversary-ipo-el...

Yes, Capitalism will surely solve the problem that Capitalism wrought, and using tools like Regulation and Policy is sure to hamper Capitalism and not help consumers or the environment at all!

How sad it is that the comment suggesting we try to not continue overpopulating the globe is downvoted while this propaganda piece isn't.

We're not overpopulating it anymore. That "solution" presents its own problems.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53409521

If by "we" you mean "the first world as it devolves into wealth inequality", sure, but it's clear there's nearly 8 billion people, so a 2.4 fertility rate not projected to turn til the end of the century probably still leaves us with 9 billion people by 2070 don't you think?

And indeed, it is a massive problem that we face, but do you truly think proposing regulation-free unhampered-by-policy capital-c Capitalism - in an era we are watching abuse against employees rise while wages drop - is the answer? I find that laughably propagandist.

Imposing population limits in the developed world won’t change anything other than make population decrease problems occur faster. If this rate of birth decline continues, we’ll have a super healthy green planet, and no humans to inhabit it.

This isn’t an argument against solar technologies et. al. It’s just the next problem that we don’t have an Al Gore for trumpeting it as an issue before it was widely known.

> Imposing population limits in the developed world

It is hard to read this and mention of "Al Gore" as anything other than arguing in bad faith. No one would propose to introduce population control in a place where that is not a problem.

Instead, reasonable actors would propose that we work to dismantle the global inequality that incentivizes impoverished families in the exploited third-world to birth many children by reigning in the ability for corporations to act as slavers in the third world and simultaneously pretend to be beacons of progress in the first. Wealth inequality, or maybe more precisely poverty, is a top driver of population growth, as children are cheaper to acquire than labor so those who need currency desperately are incentivized to birth children (and into horrendous conditions at that).

Reforming the nature of globalist capitalism would surely both help to curb population growth in these places as they became less impoverished and greatly improve our ethics.

Probably because population control threads so often devolve into eugenics.

Sure, and Capitalism devolves into late-stage regulatory-capture wealth-inequality race-to-the-bottom massive globally scaled abuses of both people and the planet. To propose that we just simply have to let "capitalists" fix the solution they have wrought is facile at best, and honestly strikes me as clearly malicious when in the same breath it is implied regulation and policy are the the enemy.

I completely agree with you there. Capitalism got us into this mess- it's naive to think it will get us out of it. I was just pointing out that population control is a bit of a "knife's edge" discussion: there are ways to discuss it that don't devolve into eugenics.. But most arguments inevitably do.

Capitalism and the free market have already been in use and the single cause of the all environmental problems.

I'm gonna suggest that electricity is the single cause of the all environmental problems. Haven't pretty much all of environmental problems occurred since its unwise discovery? And, you know, electricity and man-made climate change are both about energy. So there you go.

How does this solve the problem of externalities that exists today? And what do you do if no genius ever comes along with such a "silver bullet" solution to invite venture funding? Keep waiting and hope they are born before the externalities catch up and it's too late?

Your sustainable solution, by definition, will reduce input costs for all business.

Every business on planet earth will hand you money for reducing input costs.

Once again think long-term. Short-term the externalities does get pushed around

>Once again think long-term. Short-term the externalities does get pushed around

Congratulations on the most bloodless hot take I’ve read on HN by a country mile

> Every business on planet earth will hand you money for reducing input costs.

Not if they can get someone else to pay. And not when the benefits are years or decades away.

> Here's what will 100% not work -- Activism or Trying to 'Policy' out of your way of Climate Change problems.

Two questions:

1. Are you familiar with the concept of the tragedy of the commons? [0]

2. How comfortable are you with the idea that capitalism and free markets are policies?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

I very well know about Tragedy of Commons.

Property Rights, the bedrock of capitalism, if properly enforced, by penalizing individuals/corps that pollutes/destroys someone else's (including public) property, takes care of most governmental action that is needed.

"Enforce property and individual rights and get out of the way".

I fail to see how capitalism and free markets, which optimize for profit above all else can have any incentive in reigning in climate change.

There is zero money in preventing deforestation. There is zero money in carbon capture. There is zero money in keeping ocean’s level low.

But there is money in building levees and relocating sea-side communities.

So technically capitalism will favor burning fossil fuels over not doing it. And later when problems like these start to arise, capitalists will create companies to cope with the broken climate and make money off it.

If you apply property rights, the bedrock principle of capitalism. You'll solve all of these externalities.

Population control. There is no way that we can fit 9-10 billion people on earth and are still able to be sustainable.

I suppose you can just schedule a cron to submit in 10 years the same post with updated number to say 12B :)

Even with population control (suppose we found a way to do it and managed to avoid the large negative consequences of it which would be plenty) the uncontested growing consumption by the current population would do the planet anyway.

Speaking about solutions - until significant part of Sahara desert and the likes aren't covered by solar panels, i wouldn't believe that anybody (who matters) is taking the climate change seriously.

> Speaking about solutions - until significant part of Sahara desert and the likes aren't covered by solar panels, i wouldn't believe that anybody (who matters) is taking the climate change seriously

I think it is harder than we think, at least for the goals that Europe wants: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o

The caveat about population control, is different than how we, humans, do with all other wild-life on planet earth, we cannot reduce the available food and habitat to lower the carrying capacity, compensate for the missing predators by killing individuals in the population, or slow the population's ability to reproduce..

We have to come up with a ethic solution. But people cannot put 3-5 kids or more on earth and don't have the means to raise them accordingly.

> We have to come up with a ethic solution

If you try, won't some people somewhere on the Internet, get angry at the ideas you have, and start writing angry things to and about you?

I know a family that had 13 children. They had "the means to raise them accordingly" (basically they lived in a middle class neighborhood, drove older cars, didn't hire anyone to do work around their house - despite the father having a very high paying chief financial officer position with a large company). So... is it okay for those kinds of people to have 3-5+ kids?

> I think it is harder than we think, at least for the goals that Europe wants: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o

it seems that the main issue is that some invested in concentrated solar while photovoltaics energy cost fell from being 2x expensive to being 4x cheaper of the concentrated and just beating everything out at $0.03/KWh. As i said - cover the desert in solar panels. Transmission is only 7% loss to Berlin.

Instead Europe is building gas pipelines from Russia and others. Again, money talk, and that clearly shows that nobody takes climate change seriously.

> cron to submit in 10 years the same post with updated number to say 12B

Apparently not, look:

https://www.un.org/en/desa/world-population-projected-reach-...

"World population projected to reach 9.8 billion in 2050, and 11.2 billion in 2100"

It's slowing down. But increasing a lot, in a few countries. (I didn't downvote b.t.w)

> Population control. There is no way that we can fit 9-10 billion people on earth and are still able to be sustainable.

All BRICs are below replacement already.

You need to be careful with this framing and also think about 'Population Pressure' in regards to most developed countries - https://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk/

This is a done deal for developed countries. All of them are below the 2% replacement rate (many very far below). The places where the replacement rate is at or above 2% (often very far above 2%) are places where non-white people primarily live. Suggesting that they need to stop having so many children smacks of racism so it is politically and socially not something that people are willing to talk about.

It's not about race it's about access to modern medicine and the jobs an industrialized economy brings. The reason access to these things correlates with race in some nations is, said briefly, colonialism and its continuing impact. There are plenty of nations with birth rates below replacement where white people are by far the minority as well.

You’re neglecting per capita resource usage. Population control in low-usage high-birth rate countries has insignificant effects. Reducing usage in high-usage countries has outsized effects, and a low replacement rate is not enough to mitigate them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_...

The problem is more nuanced than that and just throwing out "Population control." is completely meaningless.

You could cull three billion people of the lowest emitters and it would have as much of an effect as halving the CO2 emissions of the top 1% of emitters.[1] And considering that to avoid the worst of the climate crisis we need action immediately or as close to it as possible, waiting for people to die away will not help us. If the entire planet stopped having babies today we would wait 65 years to get to half the current population, and half the emissions.

At best, and I would argue even that is a stretch, population control is one small part of a long term strategy. But it is by no means a solution, so throwing it out there every time people talk about sustainability does nothing but derail the conversation.

What we really need is to to make consumption as sustainable as possible and reduce it where possible, especially for the top consumers. That is not only more feasible in the short term, it is probably more ethical as well.

[1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-ric...

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