Comment by dubcanada | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dubcanada | Hacker News Reader

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A few things

> If we could wave a magic wand and completely stop our CO2 emissions it wouldn't move the needle on global warming at all.

Some people completely ignore the fact that it does help, it may not help the ozone above China, but having a country that is not pumping out ash and other byproducts into the air does make it citizens healthier. They live longer, they have less health issues, they pay more taxes (potentially longer job life span), and they are happier. So regardless of the short sighted "we are too small to do anything" statement. It does help.

> Notwithstanding these facts, the government went all in on renewables and cutting down on emissions -- despite it not making any sense -- because it's a popular measure across all age groups.

Another interesting statement, should it not make sense for a government to do what it's citizens want?

> Energy companies had to invest in still unproven renewable tech which was very costly.

Solar is fairly new, but wind is certainly not new in any fashion, along with water it is one of the oldest forms of energy generation that exist. If anything coal/nuclear are newer than wind. And tidal assuming a stable tidal pattern is also an easy engineering issue to solve. I am not sure beyond solar you can argue "unproven renewable tech".

> Had we chosen to start investing in renewables more recently, like Brazil, we would be buying better and cheaper tech.

You can't really say that, if that's an argument then nobody would ever buy anything, because it could always be better and cheaper later.

I get the reasoning for your statement, because investing in natural gas or other oil methods like that can provide more faster for the general populace. But there is no reason that renewable cannot ALSO do that, it's just nobody has an example of such case. And there are plenty of examples with gas.

> Another interesting statement, should it not make sense for a government to do what it's citizens want?

Nope, not always, and this is why direct democracy is pretty inefficient. People aren't experts, are often shortsighted and thinking at the micro level: many government policies and choices need long term thinking and expertise at the macro level. Take a look at Switzerland - "green" measures such as a carbon tax, which is considered by many experts as one of the best policies to reduce CO2 emissions, was refused by voters, because they're thinking about the impact it will have on them personally, now, and not about all the negative things which will be reduced with such a tax.

It would cost them a lot of money and have no impact on CO2 levels. Chinese and Indians will not magnanimously sacrifice their money to lower their CO2, and if they don't then it doesn't matter.

With that attitude, nobody is going to do anything.

The rest of the world can encourage China and India with economic sanctions if they won’t come along for the renewables and EV ride. With that said, China at least is an example of moving to EVs and renewables rapidly.

China is the world's manufacturing powerhouse. It's very difficult to get the economic leverage to sanction China, and convincing developing nations to go along would be virtually impossible.

> China is the world's manufacturing powerhouse. It's very difficult to get the economic leverage to sanction China, and convincing developing nations to go along would be virtually impossible.

You don't buy from them. This is already happening [1] [2] [3]. Developing nations have no purchasing power compared to the developed world. They'll kowtow to developed world hegemony if push comes to shove (at least within the scope of US foreign aid [~$40B/year] and dollar dominance).

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=manufacturing+moving+away+fr...

[2] https://www.freightwaves.com/news/manufacturers-move-away-fr...

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/20/china-factory-of-the-world-i...

Could we explore a bit in how it would cost them money. Taxes in general get back into the economy unless the government stockpile the revenue or invest them over sea. It would increase costs for companies doing exports, raising costs on mining (29.9% of total exports), and maybe organic chemicals exports. Switzerland second largest export is Pharmaceuticals, but I am unsure how much a carbon tax would impact that industry.

If they also applied it to imports then countries with high CO2 would have a harder time to export to Switzerland. Having less access to cheap products with high carbon footprint would add a costs to citizens, as alternative products will likely cost more, but then it would also encourage industries in China/India to produce products with lower footprint in order to compete on markets with carbon taxes/tariffs based on carbon footprint. It might even encourage local productions which can be a boon for the economy.

Poor countries have no incentive to pay carbon fees. Then have rich countries pay their carbon fees? So then tax payers of developed nations take the hit and have their own economic output lowered while countries ignoring carbon fees move ahead. It's a death spiral.

Have a look at Steven Koonin's "Unsettled". He was an Obama DOE appointee and Provost of Caltech (he's a physicist). He makes convincing arguments that the climate change models are highly unreliable. It's not Fox News garbage, he's legit.

The US and EU are making very large policy moves based on models that are not necessarily accurate.

But if the models are inaccurate, what if they are inaccurate in the optimistic direction?

That’s how error bars work and why they are indicated as +/-

Because the evidence doesn't point that way, and it's very expensive to make such an assumption, especially when much of the rest of the world doesn't follow.

I dunno... it's expensive in the short term but you end up with an energy infrastructure that makes you energy independent and where costs will only go down over time since solar/wind/batteries are all on a Moore's law like cost trajectory.

Fossil fuels meanwhile will on average only get more expensive over time because they are being depleted, and this isn't considering other externalities besides CO2 emissions.

There are reasons besides climate change to get off fossil fuel.

>Nope, not always, and this is why direct democracy is pretty inefficient. People aren't experts

This was also the Monarchist argument for not even allowing representative democracy (rule by "rabble").

Swiss laws are actually fairly decent while your American representative democracy proves that representative democracy really is rule-by-experts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes

> This was also the Monarchist argument for not even allowing representative democracy (rule by "rabble").

And their premise was stupid because rule by inheritance has zero guarantees. A representative democracy can more easily have a meritocratic aspect to it.

> your American representative democracy

I'm not american, and they literally have one of the worst possible "democratic" systems, so shouldn't be used for anything else other than an example on what not to do.

>> Notwithstanding these facts, the government went all in on renewables and cutting down on emissions -- despite it not making any sense -- because it's a popular measure across all age groups.

> Another interesting statement, should it not make sense for a government to do what it's citizens want?

"and now we have one the highest energy prices in all of Europe."

'want' is an evolving metric. I'm sure they want low energy prices now.

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