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Comment by NohatCoder | Hacker News Reader

Always, without fail, whenever the talk falls on taxing CO2, someone will bring up "think of the poor". Usually someone who would otherwise do nothing to help the poor.

It is pretty simple, we have to do something about everyone's emissions, including the poor's. If that places an unbearable burden on the poor, maybe we should do something in addition, in order to help the poor. Like UBI, making public services free, forcing employers to pay decent wages, building sufficient cheap housing, and a lot of other stuff.

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> Always, without fail, whenever the talk falls on taxing CO2, someone will bring up "think of the poor".

The thing is: even if the masses cut back on CO2 to the point they are barely surviving, all that saving will be a drop in the bucket compared to the emissions caused by the rich. And the masses aren't dumb, everyone with half a brain can realize they are being shafted. I would really prefer a way out of disaster that does not lead to immense death and suffering from either a revolution (which will come inevitably once the pressure gets too high) or from climate change consequences.

your inclusion of political violence here has conversational gravity .. when it is survival at stake, suddenly all efficient, stable thinking goes out the window. It becomes "fastest animal" race for the door (or mountaintop fortress or whatever).

Simple efficiency is a real solution given actual implementation. Do not throw out goodwill and stability with this political violence spectre.

> It becomes "fastest animal" race for the door (or mountaintop fortress or whatever).

As a planet, we are at that point already, we have been at it for at least a decade or longer when people started migrating inside of Africa and then towards Europe as droughts made farming and survival fiendishly difficult to outright impossible.

And our politicians have already begun preparing for the real escalation of the climate wars - the US have built a massive border wall in the South and are quite okay with dumping water left behind in the desert [1] and other atrocities, and here in Europe Frontex has been engaging in illegal pushbacks and criminalization of sea rescue for years as well [2]. We are normalizing atrocities to keep the Western countries clean from the consequences of mostly our own CO2 emissions.

> Simple efficiency is a real solution given actual implementation. Do not throw out goodwill and stability with this political violence spectre.

There is no goodwill left in US politics, not on the Republican side at least. Europe has the goodwill, but unfortunately a lot of decisions require unanimous consent and China particularly has used the 2008ff financial crisis to strategically take over critical assets and countries, not to mention the historic links Russia has to major German and Italian parties. As I detailed below, I see it highly likely that a frustrated populace - either from the left or the right wing, but I believe that the far-right will be more effective - will resort to massive social unrest like in France with the Yellow Vests.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/01/2...

[2] https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/frontex-scandal-...

this kind of foaming-at-the-mouth list of problems is exactly what pushes real solutions away, and precipitates crisis thinking. A border wall at Mexico is the sign of the Apocalypse Now ? check your mania, please.

I have a picture saved from a US Congressional hearing in the first US "oil shock" of the 1970s. Large, real fiscal policy was put to the test and people were definitely upset. The four economists at the table made history because they used quantitative methods to find leverage points in an apparently intractable situation. They resisted "crisis thinking" and instead took the hard road of analytics, and made real improvement. Both from a policy point of view, but importantly the crisis of "what can we do" in the minds of many.

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