European Parliament adopts key laws to reach 2030 climate target | Hacker News Reader

European Parliament adopts key laws to reach 2030 climate target

europarl.europa.eu

17 pointsmatsemann22 comments

One thing here I think could be good is the new co2 toll on importing goods. No longer should it be profitable to outsource your climate destroying production outside EU and then import the goods back. For certain goods you have to pay the difference between the carbon price between EU and your country of production when importing. E.g if producing steel in the EU costs €5 in carbon taxes and in some non-EU country equivalent of €3, you would have to pay €2 when importing it.

This achieves two things: Instead of continuing as before, but just polluting somewhere else and pretending we're "clean", this actually incentivizes better to reduce co2 usage. Secondly, it should make it more attractive to keep production in Europe.

Yes and no. This kind of thing only works if it's practically done worldwide. Otherwise it'll only hurt the EU a lot economically.

It could be that it becomes practically standard like other EU initiatives such as RoHS. But in this case it's a lot costlier to comply.

Also, taxing doesn't necessarily mean emissions will be restricted. It could be that the market just absorbs the extra cost and continues as usual.

Right now the taxes doesn't work at all. You just move all production abroad since it's then cheaper there. So at least I hope it will be better than how it currently is.

And even if someone will just absorb the cost and raise prices, someone will perhaps figure out a more climate friendly way of doing the production of a goods => can produce it cheaper because of less taxes => can sell to consumers for lower prices => other companies have to follow suit.

> Yes and no. This kind of thing only works if it's practically done worldwide. Otherwise it'll only hurt the EU a lot economically.

I agree, but at least EU would get a head start and have companies and knowledge built up around greener technologies. Sooner or later the rest of the world will have to adopt greener solutions even if they don't want it now. Either because it will be cheaper than oil and coal or because they notice they have more fires than water around.

Electric cars, electricity produced from wind and solar etc will be much cheaper than coal and oil based solutions so it just needs a little push right now to kick out the incumbent.

And not to mention the national security perspective. With wind and solar production we get rid of dependence from countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia. In the event of war the country is much more resilient as electricity for heating, cooking and transportation is produced locally and spread out on buildings etc instead of a few massive plants.

Agreed and I hope so too. It sets the scene for others to adopt similar policies. The reality is that regardless of the current economic trends, we're in trouble in the longer term if we continue wrecking the planet.

No thanks.

https://clintel.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/WCD-version-0...

I like how this promotes on top that it's signed by "NOBEL LAUREATE PROFESSOR IVAR GIAEVER", trying to give it some weight. He's head of Klimarealistene in Norway, aka "climate realists". And they have time and time again shown that they can't even comprehend the simplests of graphs.

For instance they still use this graph on the left: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ERzEmzxWoAAedrS?format=jpg&name=...

It shows the change of ice each year (aka the derivative of amount of ice). They however keep using it saying "the amount of ice is actually increasing since 2012". While of course anyone can see that each year the graph is below 0, the ice is melting. Shown in the graph on the right. So what the graph is showing is that the rate of ice melting is a bit down, it's still melting a lot each year...

So he's either clueless, and not worth listening to. Or he's intentionally misleading, and therefore still not worth listening to.

And looking at the list of other signatories from Norway, they are almost all connected to our petroleum industry. How unremarkable. While I'm normally not trying to go after a person (I'd rather go after their arguments), the whole list is meant as one big "appeal to authority" by showcasing some doctors and others signing. Then I think it's only fair pointing this out.

I have a legitimate question here. Isn't 40 years quite literally nothing in terms of human life on Earth, let alone climate on Earth? Shouldn't we discussing a graph/timeline of at least 100k years? Is it because we don't have any data going back? Weren't there periods with much more variability, such as ice ages and the little ice age during the last millennium?

Reminds me of people discussing astronomic events. It could be any day now. "Any day" being today or 10 million years from now.

I don't think your question is legitimate, given that your only other post here is conspiratory. And what do you suggest we do? Nothing, and hope for the best? I'd rather we try, based on our best knowledge so far.

It is legitimate.

As far as the other post goes, there's nothing conspiratory about it. Politicians and bureaucrats use excuses or disingenuous arguments to lobby their ideas all the time. Maybe some of them geniunely believe it.

I'll try. Here's two graphs which can illustrate the historical data.

https://i0.wp.com/eos.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/figure-... [1]

This first one is still a short timescale geologically, but shows pretty clearly how fast the change in global temperature is.

https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_widt... [2]

This second one puts that change in a geological context. The Earth has been hotter than it is now, but for example, during some of those previous time periods you had crocodile-like ancestors living in the Canadian arctic regions. [2]

These graphs show why the 40 year timescale is relevant. On geological timescales that's not even a blink, but that's how fast the climate is changing right now. That's what makes it so scary, and why we need to act in an equally fast manner.

[1] https://eos.org/articles/what-five-graphs-from-the-u-n-clima... [2] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte...

Thanks!

If I understood correctly, the second graph indicates that this is nothing but a local maximum. Therefore, the main argument is that the change has been abrupt? The problem I see is that it's only in the last 150 years that we're able to measure these changes with precision. We'll never know how many times in the past has climate changed abruptly.

That doesn't necessarily mean that we should do nothing about it. It's only that we don't really know.

It's truly possible that all the people studying it are wrong, that it's a coincidence that this temperature increase is happening right as we starting adding a whole bunch of stuff into the atmosphere that can be experimentally demonstrated to heat up the atmosphere, that some natural effect we aren't aware of is causing the sudden shift. But it seems unlikely enough that we shouldn't bet the planet on it. As far as we know through observation and experimentation, we have created this mess, and until we get strong evidence that says otherwise we should keep working under that assumption.

Here's a timeline that goes back 20k years: https://xkcd.com/1732/

There's no better explanation for the abrupt increase in temperatures since 1900 other than emissions from burning fossil fuels.

I wouldn't even try to go deep into the logic of climate deniers. They are either bots or real humans paid a lot of money to spread misinformation for someone's benefit.

I'm not paid at all, and I found the wording extremely weird. What the hell does "climate denier" even mean? I'm not denying the concept of climate.

When it comes to climate change, define the change. The climate has changed for millions of years and there were eras on Earth that were extremely more hostile to human life than now.

There's something very "off" to this conversation.

If you know where I can get paid for posting this, please let me know.

This is the only valid answer. Unfortunately, the EU will use the "think of the climate", "think of the children" and "think of the terrorists" excuses for everything.

A web site with a suspicious lack of disclosure regarding who is funding their organization... I'll believe the scientific consensus in favour of a PDF from a sketchy organzation signed by people with job titles such as "Advisor in Innovation Processes", "Technical Director Eon NRG", "urologist", "Bachelor of Arts degree, Bachelor of Laws degree, retired", "Founder and Leader of the Institute for Private Enterprise", "Nuclear Physicist", "MSc Information Technology specialising in computer modelling, prediction, optimisation and advanced AI, Author of Trigger Warming, Everything You Wanted To Know About Global Warming But Were Afraid To Ask" and so on. Anyone can collect a list of thousands of unqualified cranks. For anyone else who is reading this, consider that:

> Nearly all actively publishing climate scientists say humans are causing climate change.[4][5] Surveys of the scientific literature are another way to measure scientific consensus. A 2019 review of scientific papers found the consensus on the cause of climate change to be at 100%,[2] and a 2021 study concluded that over 99% of scientific papers agree on the human cause of climate change.[3] The small percentage of papers that disagreed with the consensus often cannot be replicated or contain errors.[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climat...

Now a question for HN: in the meantime what are USA and UK doing on this matter?

Or more importantly, China?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com