I mean at the end of the day attempting to shift blame to "the corporations" for emissions is neglecting the fact that the corporations are emitting in order to (ultimately) supply consumers.
If corporations pass the tax to consumers and the price of their product becomes undesirable using current mechanisms of production, who cares? That's an unsustainable business. If the product is a necessity, run it as a non-profit government utility or businesses can adapt with technology.
edit: and in fact if we want to solve these issue the sort of actions we will need to take. There isn't anyone who could fix these problems easily without sacrifices and is choosing not to
Why stop at buying your own electricity plant? Make your own solar panels to make absolutely sure no chemicals are getting leached into the local water supply. Hell, mine your own cobalt or lithium while you're at it. How else are we going to make such a Great Leap Forward?
Worth noting come of those tradeoffs may need to be accepting environmental pollution of the traditional kind. We also can absolutely redistribute wealth. Literally all standards, car safety, apartment safety, job safety, impact the poorest most, and we can and should solve that with redistributive policies, but I doubt most on hackernews are in the receiving redistributions slice of society
The statistic is completely meaningless in the context of emissions. The only relevant statistics are total emissions. The atmosphere doesn't count a carbon atom differently by the market cap of the company that dig it up. It doesn't even count them differently if a person emits a tonne or 1000 people emit 1kg each.
this is kind of an aside, but i keep noticing this weird dissonance that keeps cropping up in conversations about regulation where people seem to assume:
consumers organizing to exercise power normally allocated to a government is somehow preferable to the existing government exercising power according to civil mandate
in a representative democracy, the latter is presumably the ideal. in the former situation, any context, you're talking about dual power, which is not politically stable, to put it mildly.
when people say "it's not my personal responsibility" to make all the personal choices necessary to reduce carbon output, they are stating an expectation that a responsible society would systematically account for these externalities and other obligations.
there is a bit of reason to this already discussed. markets by definition are not able to account for externalities, it's not possible for individuals to gather enough information to make these decisions reliably, etc. this political choice is an organized consumer choice, asking the socially approved bodies that have this information and power, to surface the results in a way that consumers can understand and react to.
when this political/consumer choice is undone or blocked, or dismissed as irresponsible in preference to individual consumer behavior, it encourages individuals to organize dual power and take direct action.
you can see this organizing developing through pipeline resistance and train sabotage and the like. sure, people could theoretically just buy gas from the least evil gas station or whatever, but once you've got enough people thinking about consumer choice to be effective, you've got enough people to literally just go and take apart the thing you don't like.
so this dismissal of regulation is necessarily combined with repression against people advocating for organized action.
i'm not sure everyone talking about this understands it or will like where it leads.
And just because you aim a policy on paper at big companies doesn't actually mean it doesn't impact consumers. You can say there are just 100 companies responsible for most global warming, but if you went and made them stop everyone would starve, and if you tax them everyone will find themselves not able to buy as much as they otherwise would. You can of course also accompany any of these policies with a redistribution of wealth, either by printing money, or by some tax scheme, but you are reducing the pie.
Obviously though we should still do this, the long term impacts of not doing it will be worse and also impact consumers
Second, virtually nothing consumers require is inherently ghg-emitting, it’s just the cheapest way to satisfy the need, which is why trying to satisfy in a less ghg-intensive way is economically unviable until you start punishing ghg-intensive processes.
There is zero blame on consumers as I see it - they want something inherently ghg-intensive, they’ll have to pay higher price.
Incentives work on all levels but you need to start with the source - producers. They must pay for externalities.
You could say the same for corporations. There's nothing about an incorporated legal entity that requires the emission of greenhouse gasses.
>There is zero blame on consumers as I see it - they want something inherently ghg-intensive, they’ll have to pay higher price.
There is zero blame on corporations as I see it - if consumers don't want something inherently ghg-intensive, they’ll have to pay higher price.
Except profit maximization, you mean?
> if consumers don't want something inherently ghg-intensive, they’ll have to pay higher price.
And they will, that’s the point. Doesn’t shift an ounce of blame off of corporations to customers - they will proceed to destroy the environment because short term profits are more important than long term survival.
that just goes back to your previous comment. There's nothing about consumers that require them to emit greenhouse gasses, but they do so because it's the cheapest.
>they will proceed to destroy the environment because short term profits are more important than long term survival.
they won't emit greenhouse gasses if there's a market for non greenhouse gas emitting products. See for instance, all the GMO-free/organic/vegan/free-range/fair trade products at your local supermarket. I'm not sure about all the labels, but I know for a fact that organic products have better margins than conventional ones.
Profit maximization requires them to use the cheapest method if they can get away with it.
> they won't emit greenhouse gasses if there's a market for non greenhouse gas emitting products
Except for pretty much the entire market of products that exist currently, you mean?
> I know for a fact that organic products have better margins than conventional ones
Right, because the 5-10% of consumers that are able to afford it and are shamed into “personal carbon footprint” mindset choose to take on economic harm in order to produce even more profits for the same scammy corporations that often own those “eco-friendly” brands.
It’s mind boggling you don’t see anything wrong with all this.
well, not really. Just like consumers can be shamed into buying fair trade coffee rather than the non-fair trade coffee, corporations can be shamed into being zero emission. There's quite a few wealthy tech companies that do just that.
>Except for pretty much the entire market of products that exist currently, you mean?
And who's on the other side of those markets? Are consumers buying oil because oil companies has drilled them out of the ground and need to unload them, or do consumers want oil (and don't care much where it comes from) and oil companies are fulfilling that demand?
>Right, because the 5-10% of consumers that are able to afford it and are shamed into “personal carbon footprint” mindset choose to take on economic harm in order to produce even more profits for the same scammy corporations that often own those “eco-friendly” brands.
>It’s mind boggling you don’t see anything wrong with all this.
Flip side of this is that 90-95% of consumers can't afford it and/or don't care about the environment that much to pay for zero carbon gasoline or whatever, but you're unhappy with that and you want the government to step in and force them to switch to zero carbon gas.
Do you drink oil? Do you eat it? Does your organism require it, so that you create this supposed INHERENT DEMAND FOR OIL? Of course not, but given how dishonest you’ve been so far, I foresee you trying to find some roundabout way to argue even that position.
> you're unhappy with that and you want the government to step in and force them to switch to zero carbon gas.
No, I want government to reduce profits of those who benefit off destroying the environment and use that money to subsidize environmentally friendly produce for consumers who wouldn’t be able to afford it.
Does my body need oil? No. Do I want a convenient and cheap mode of transportation that allows me to get me from my white picket suburban house (which I also want) to other places I have to be? Yes. Do I also want a cheap source of energy to power various creature comforts in my white picket suburban house? Also yes.
>No, I want government to reduce profits of those who benefit off destroying the environment and use that money to subsidize environmentally friendly produce for consumers who wouldn’t be able to afford it.
"We're going to [do thing to fix problem] and make [maligned entity] pay for it!"
Neither of those requires unsustainable energy production.
> We're going to [do thing to fix problem] and make [maligned entity] pay for it!
Got other ideas to address externalities? Or are you just like all libertarians going to pretend they don’t exist until it’s too late and nothing can be done about it?
Being able to fuel up your SUV without having to spend $10/gal does. The average HN user making $150k/year salary might be able to absorb such a bump in fuel price, but not the average american.
>> We're going to [do thing to fix problem] and make [maligned entity] pay for it!
>Got other ideas to address externalities? Or are you just like all libertarians going to pretend they don’t exist until it’s too late and nothing can be done about it?
The part I'm making fun of isn't "tax carbon to internalize externalities". The part I'm making fun of is the thought that you can do it without making the end-consumer pay for it.
You're playing into exactly what they are saying and you don't even see it, wow.
Consumers have certain needs/desires (cooking, electricity, etc), but they don't have a need/desire for greenhouse gas emissions.
It may be most cost effective to allow gas leaks while delivering the gas, but that shouldn't be equated to demand leading to gas leaks.
https://news.stanford.edu/2022/01/27/rethinking-cooking-gas/
The goal is to align incentives such that companies can produce goods without destroying the planet. The goods themselves are not the issue.
The problem is that at the end of the carbon tax equation, what does the money go towards? Can we significantly offset carbon emissions with the tax income? Is it already too late? Without some significant rebalancing humanity's greed and feelings towards nature, I'm not even sure any of this would ever work.
You can buy from a different company, or a subsitute good, or not buy it. We aren't powerless at all. Companies live and die by consumer purchasing decisions.
> The goal is to align incentives such that companies can produce goods without destroying the planet. The goods themselves are not the issue.
It depends on the goods. Some can't be produced without destroying the planet.
I don't understand: Everyone is always lying? You have no power to identify the truth and act on it?
Nobody said "all", we don't have to live in a world of perfection and extremes. We can buy electric cars, use renewable energy.
> even if we were informed for a particular product there may be no better behaved alternatives in the marketplace for something we consider to be a necessity.
Things might not turn out well if you try something, so don't try? How do someone get out of bed in the morning on that basis?
Your point is that you are absolutely powerless to do anything? It's obviously false, but why is that important to you?
Who said anything about the majority? And that's certainly not the demographic of HN, or the people creating most of the carbon footprint.
Also, by advanced economy standards, most of the world is deep in poverty.
> majority don’t have the luxury to go for the more expensive option because of their love of the environment.
It's not luxury and love, but necessity, responsibility, and survival. The impovrished people will suffer the most. Also, the options aren't necessarily more expensive, and are generally much cheaper if you account for the costs of climate change.
either you were led to believe it's only personal responsibility of direct consumers to account for the costs of climate change, or you were paid to propagandize that claim.
if first - you're wrong, if second - i'll leave it unsaid.
The per capita carbon emission of the US is about 14 tons or so. Of those, 4 are things the government or other entities are doing on your behalf that you don't have any control over but 10 are going towards your own consumption of things like patios and plane flights and beef. You can't realistically get that down to 0 but you can certainly cut back a whole want if you want to. Or you can pass laws that prevent corporations from producing carbon and offering you the things you want to consume, given the collective action that way makes a lot of sense.
Now, for some things like methane leaks there are obvious ways to reduce the carbon cost of our consumption out of proportion to the reduction in our consumption. But for others, like plane flights, we don't have any means yet of doing that.
In the end if we want large reductions in our carbon footprints without large technological innovations it's going to have to mostly result in us consuming less.
It’s pathetic that the thought process of corporate PR flacks has sunk into the brains of normal people.
My wife used to be a finance director for a water utility. Part of that gig was having a capital program that proactively maintained infrastructure.
When they started that program ~20 years ago, they were criticized for a resulting higher rate structure. (5-7%) more than a similar city in the region. But now… that difference flipped and then some. A key failure of critical valves in the neighboring city cost nearly $10M, while the planned replacement was like 80% less.
The real problem IMO is that cognitive biases can prevent people from making those objective decisions. When dealing with things like probability of failure where there's uncertainty, it's easy to be swayed by a competing priority that feels like it has more immediacy and less uncertainty.
I think it's the opposite: Saying that poeple are powerless, and entirely dependant on corporations, is the thought process and message of the corporations. We are just helpless subjects of the aristocracy.
> It’s pathetic
It's sad that people add these words, which rationally only indicate a lack of argument, and practically tell us nothing and inflame discussion on the Internet - where it hardly needs to be inflamed.
They want to make big money, the fact they give you products it is not the goal. Is it still legal to just burn the gas at the oil pumps?I remember videos of burning flames on top of this oil pumps and I don't think we the consumers asked for that, it is just that a billionaire oil dude won't invest into fixing the issue when he can open more oil/gas drilling sites and make more billions.
As an example, about 20% of the emissions in the US stem from residential energy usage (0). Blaming energy companies for these emissions is ignorant of the fact that it's supplying the demand of the American citizens who are using that energy in the first place - and while shifting that blame off to some faceless corporation or billionaire villain might result in some good policy decisions to reduce emissions (for example, making gas and oil so expensive to extract or use for energy production that residential energy providers switch to renewables) but it goes too far from absolving consumers from the fact their demand creates the market that generates emissions in the first place - which leads to bad policy decisions like leaving homes to use natural gas for heating and cooking.
All I'm saying is that when it comes to emissions and climate change we need to look at it holistically, rather than come up with these mythical comic book villains.
I agree that someone that keeps the lights or TV on while he is not using them is also at fault but it is not possible to catch the person that is doing this , where it is easy to make illegal the behavior that is easy to control for. Maybe the gas will cost a bit more but this might encourage new technology to appear or green energy to take over.
I am curious if this happens somewhere in US and if there are results or is too socialist to ever happen? In my country(Romania) there is a tax for polution (for ex cars with old or big engines pay a bigger tax), this tax money goes into green programs, like persons can install solar panel or isolate their homes and the government will give you some money up to 90%. (I am expecting comments like the poor pay for the rich solar panels but IMO you could make the rules to add limits on who can benefit.
Punishment is not the only, and in fact one of the worst, means of changing behavior. You can also educate people, who despite the current devotion to cynicism, generally will do the right thing. Lots of people turn the lights off.
> I am curious if this happens somewhere in US and if there are results or is too socialist to ever happen?
How do you define socialist? There are many regulations and fines in the US. Climate change has been politicized by one party here in order to, afaict, make it to inflammatory to agree on any action.
Sounds like we need to focus on the much larger 80% of emissions first to me, as that's where the vast majority of the problem lies, by definition.
I don't buy the idea that unless we attempt to solve 100% of the problem on the first try, we can't start working on a solution.
Alternatively... What if we do both in parallel? I'm also of the opinion that you can more likely change things in your own life than get a big corporation to change something, so you could make small gains within the next year as far as reducing personal impact, and still keep on fighting for the bigger problem to be solved at the same time.
Source? Google info box says:
>Methane is a powerful greenhouses gas with a 100-year global warming potential 28-34 times that of CO2. Measured over a 20-year period, that ratio grows to 84-86 times.
I was off slightly, but not an order of magnitude.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jan/16/greenhou...
One of the points missed in this conversation is that a lot of oil/gas drilling occurs in remote or inhospitable regions.
Edit: dropped a word
Oil and gas companies are usually distinct from the utilities (regulated monopolies) that provide electricity. If you want the O&G companies to subsidize the local populations energy, it makes more sense for them to do so with their existing infrastructure rather than forcing them to use some inefficient process. It will be cheaper for all involved.
The better solution is to just price the externality with regulation.
The solution isn't to not supply consumers, it is to supply them in a more sustainable way.
In some cases this may not be possible, but in many cases it is. We shouldn't push to destroy our quality of life, we should push to make it sustainable.
This can only happen through regulation, because as a consumer, you can't really choose to pay 10% more to get e.g. a laptop where the aluminium was smelted using renewable energy.
I do think there is a bit of asymmetry here and there is some blame to dish out, in that there are corporations (e.g. Big Oil) that are spending large sums lobbying to try to distract the public from implementing effective solutions that would eat into their profits. There isn't really a propaganda machine that's as focused on misdirection in defense of special interests in the other direction. (I suppose the Fox News retort would be that the IPCC are being alarmist to inflate their grant budgets? But I think we're many orders of magnitude off in terms of $-weighted harms here vs. emissions from the oil & gas industry.) I wouldn't say we should blame the corporations for their emissions, just for their shady astroturfing, self-interested lobbying, and other activities that misdirect the public dialog on the harms of their emissions.
At the end of the day, the high-level solution is simple (not easy): rather than thinking about emissions as something that is the "fault" of companies or individuals, if we tax the externality that we care about (CO2 emissions) at a consistent price, then the market will work out the rest. The CO2 tax will get baked in to the price of every good, and people will naturally shift their consumption away from goods that are unreasonably CO2-producing (as they will become unreasonably expensive).
I'm not a free-market maximalist, but this is one of the cases where markets are the best solution to the problem.
This isn't an easy solution to implement though, as it requires strong international coordination to prevent emissions from being offshored to countries that either don't sign up to the carbon tax, or that do sign up but enforce laxly. If the US was really on board with achieving this, they could probably team up with the EU and succeed.
Well, kinda. We banned plasic straws to "save the seas", while most of the palstics in the seas are from industrial and fishing equipment, that are not affedcted by the banned straws.
Custumer wants a cooked burger, and sure, some emissions come from cooking burgers (and all the other processes, from the animals birth to a burger patty in the restaurants fridge), but I'm pretty sure none of the customers wanted gas leaks.
Same with plastics... we banned straws, so it seems that "the government is doing something", while most of the plastics in the seas are either fishing/industrial equipment, or trash from a few rivers in asia. Just look at the amount of plastic packaging that is used and discarded from production to retail of many items, even paper "eco" straws (if nothing else, the amount of plasic foil used to package the straws on the pallet).
Also, re: veganism. Go vegan to reduce suffering.