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Comment by fwungy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

With that attitude, nobody is going to do anything.

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