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Comment by Bostonian | Hacker News Reader

I think climate activists want to drastically raise the cost of owning and operating a car, which will make a cars a luxury good unavailable to the middle class. As people catch on, this policy stance will become very unpopular.

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If the cost of owning and operating a car included paying for externalities like CO2 emissions it would already be unaffordable to the middle class. Internalizing those costs is only fair.

If the full costs of existing as a human being were internalized, nobody would be able to afford to live. Existence itself imposes a cost on the environment. Even Grok the caveman had to burn wood for warmth, releasing CO2 and particulates into the atmosphere.

I think the better approach is Locke's "enough and as good" proviso.

Burning wood (certainly before things like medieval deforestation) isn't a cost on the environment. The carbon from firewood is already “in cycle”. Unlike the carbon that is millions of years old that we have dug up from the ground.

A false equivalence.

Burning wood is absolutely a cost on the environment; just ask anyone who grew up in homes heated by firewood. But of course, as you say, the scale is different. Should your example of medieval deforestation have been impermissible for environmental reasons, then? Where should the line be drawn? Who has the authority to draw that line?

No (non-nuclear) renewable technology currently exists that can by itself meet the energy demands of developed world standards of living. I'm not sure if wind and solar alone can even meet a developing country's standard of living. I'd really like it if we could build a thousand new nuclear power plants, but of course, reality is often disappointing and we get things like Germany shutting down its nuclear reactors and burning more coal instead.

If companies would have to pay for externalities as well as the exploitation of the less developed world: capitalism wouldn't be “competitive”.

In the US perhaps but Singapore is super dense and has actual public transit. You can't do it in most US cities because we're so captured at the car-centric local maxima for 99% of our cities. Ultimately it's an issue we should really address but it's so entrenched into the cities and people's housing it'll take a major event to change.

Greens are already unpopular among that segment.

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