Fossil Fuel Use Increasing, Not Decreasing
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Let’s repeal the tax and wait for the good times people say. They’re not anti-environment they say, they just want to try unspecified different solutions, so long as it costs them nothing. Once we burn a little more fuel, the good times will be here, and we can lay off a bit.
People don’t seem to have the stomach to accept what’s coming even to the extent they’re willing to act together to ensure we all have a better future. I never expected people to do much. Yet I was never this pessimistic.
I usually figure a simple carbon dividend might be a more effective pitch. If you produce an average amount of carbon, you pay $x in tax and get a refund of $x. If you produce more, you come out negative, and if you produce less you make money on net. So, the clear incentive is to use less than your peers in an eventual race to the bottom.
(One risk is poor folks might actually produce more carbon than the middle class, with older vehicles in disrepair and poorly insulated homes)
At the end of the day though, consent of the public is what will move the needle. Carbon taxes might be Pareto Efficient and popular with economists, but if the public just hates all new taxes and won’t go for it, it’s right in theory but wrong in practice.
I would expect flights to be what really sets the average.
Any sane politician should pay the dividend before the tax is introduced, because that makes the tax more palatable and less delayable, because you're already bleeding money.
Carbon fee and dividend proposals often require almost all the money to not be possible to spend on anything besides the dividend.
Whats coming?
If we look at doom&gloom predictions of "climate change" we see - objectively, none of those "whats coming" have happened.
Or how about wildfires turning the sky orange. Fire existed before global climate change, but it's made the fire season longer and fires more frequent. Fires in Canada made the sky's orany for much of the North Eastern US. It's pretty hard to ignore the sky being the wrong color.
Objectively, yes, things have happened.
What is scary about the climate and the environment is that they are highly dynamic systems. If anyone has studied dynamical systems, there are certainly points where everything is "fine" and then boom, a sudden critical point is hit and things go off the rails. The worry is that we seem to be constantly teetering on a critical point. Or we are simply in slow motion destruction. Or both.
Take any closed ecosystem (which the Earth is) and imagine doing to it what we do to the Earth. Is it any surprise things are going off the rails? Resources are not infinite and almost none of them are mined/gathered without major consequences to the environment.
Have you watched any documentaries? Animals and plants are struggling heavily in a myriad of ways and just flat going extinct at increasing rates. Glaciers are going away. Oceans are poisoned and hypoxic. Animals and even humans are filled with microplastics. Technology and capitalism is ripping society apart in a way in which a certain class of people have their thumbs over everyone else. There are literally plastic rocks being formed. Weather events are getting more extreme. Wildfires are increasing.
> objectively, none of those "whats coming" have happened
Search for any of those things and please tell me you still feel this way. Even something specific as a search for "birds filled with plastic" will show that this is not true. Does this look like things have not objectively happened with the climate? https://www.greenmatters.com/weather-and-global-warming/pict...
No need to hide BS behind long wordy sentences to look smart. Nothing has "come to fruition" - nor doom&gloom predictions of Maldives going under water or any sorts of that.
Definitions like yours are easily dismissed when we start talking specifics and look what "climate change" adepts preached 10-20-30 years ago. It's easy to look smart talking about vague books.
If you old enough to remember, popular preaching in 70s was "global cooling" with predictions about would freezing by 21st century. Needless to say it went the same road predictions about "global boiling" are heading to - be proven by historical data as made up and out of context.
This isn't a matter of opinion; objectively, these things are happening, and there is no reason for them not to get worse.
I would call for some historical data and do some data-backed comparisons, but given your emotional responses it likely will be pointless.
I see Soviet Union and modern tech giants as two extremes here. In USSR party people had a final say in planning, often disregarding "efficient" part. In tech giants people are out of the loop and decisions are made "by algorithm".
Which alternative do you like more?
But prices haven't dropped isn't?
My guess is that a fair chunk of the predicted extraction by 2030 will never happen.
- Noam Chomsky, 2020
Society won't be serious about climate change until disastrous levels are reached. And even then we'll have plenty of actors willing to burn fossil fuels clandestinely. We're in for a rough ride for the next century or so.
But even besides the issue of alternative energy sources, we insist on growing our consumerist, capitalistic economy being made more efficient by THE DAY by soulless tech companies like Google, so what do you expect?
Countries should re-tool to be more self-sustainable in terms of the basics of food, shelter, and basic products. We should strive to make economies less efficient and more self-sufficient.
Wealthy nations are seeing reductions in total CO2 emissions. US dropped from 6 billion metric tons in 2007 to 5 billion metric tons in 2022. That’s back to 1988 levels despite 40% population growth, increased prosperity, and all those crossovers and giant SUV’s. Including imports and exports changes these numbers slightly, but doesn’t change the overall trend.
Developing countries are adopting zero carbon technologies because their cost effective, but they are also ramping up fossil fuel use because they are simply growing so quickly. Ethiopia’s real GDP growth rate is 6.1%/year and that’s a good thing in almost every context except pollution.
When you say simpler lifestyles you mean higher infant mortality, poor sanitation, dirt roads, and all those other ills from poverty. Yes people living in the tropics also want AC, so do we.
This isn’t about people in Bangladesh/US wanting an iPhone or designer clothing. Electronics barely move the CO2 needle, it’s things we take for granted like clean drinking water that takes massive infrastructure and tons of concrete.
Less imported food instead of home-grown food, less imported clothes, less new things that replace perfectly good old things...
Air travel, ICE cars, fossil fuel or municipal waste power plants, concrete, steel, etc matters. 3G vs 5G really really doesn’t.
Grocery stores hand out plastic bags so happily because they are cheap. Stuff being cheap means it’s associated with very minimal CO2 because releasing CO2 means using a valuable resource. Further all that carbon in the bag ends up sequestered in a dump making plastic packaging a great way to use up oil reserves without burning them.
PS: Upgrading phones every 2 years is like buying a car, that old phone generally gets traded in and someone else uses it instead of simply dumping it.
And there would be much more poverty, disease, and death. Not to mention that we wouldn't be able to have this conversation since the medium in which we are having it requires an industrial, technological society, which "simpler lifestyles" can't support.
Probably mostly outsourcing manufacture and associated pollution elsewhere (e.g. China).
Really we’re talking a 17% drop in CO2 emissions it would take quite a lot to offset it.
How is unconstrained growth at all costs not part of this?
> Wealthy nations are seeing reductions in total CO2 emissions
Because they are off shored, are they not? And developing countries are increasingly using fossil fuels because of their adoption of capitalism and of technologies (i.e., customers) from developed countries, are they not?
It may be a part, but it may also be a lazy ideological distraction.
For example, here north of the Alps, a significant factor in the total CO2 budget is heating of homes, which cannot be offshored and cannot be simply banned; previous generations had this problem, too, and they cut down most of the primeval forests for the same purpose. (Europe is now significantly more forested than in the 16th century.)
Looking back at my childhood in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, our heating was notoriously dirty, burning low-quality coal directly in houses, streets full of stinking smoke. Our centrally planned economy stagnated (degrowth!), so replacing old dirty coal-based equipment with something more modern was economically challenging.
Just because a socialist country caused pollution, doesn't mean that capitalism cannot cause pollution for its own reasons.
Pretty much the universal experience from east of the Iron Curtain was the opposite. Ecological initiatives were a part of the coalition of the unhappy that brought the regimes down at the end of the eighties.
But I get your point.
Population continues to grow. Energy per capita in the developing economies continues to increase.
Whereas in the developed economies energy per capita is decreasing, it's still much higher than in developing economies.
The only way thru this is adding more renewable energy capacity faster, for everyone, everywhere. A lot more. Fast enough to both replace fossil fuels and keep up with demand.
For instance, China's demand for new energy means they're building more of everything. More nukes, solar, wind, AND coal.
Solar is the cheapest option, and getting cheaper. Installed capacity is doubling every 20 (?) months. China is adding more solar every year than the rest of the world combined.
But it's still not enough. Therefore, China is compelled to add more coal too.
This (pathetic) NYT article explains none of that.
Meanwhile the cost of energy is going down faster than at any time in my entire life. They’re building an 800MW offshore wind plant off my coast, and another 2000MW is scheduled to go in down in Virginia. The per-watt cost of solar is now below most fossil fuels, and continues to plummet each year. None of this is perfect - there are still challenges related to capacity and demand matching - but it’s hard to argue that we’ll be facing some kind of long term society-limiting energy crisis in my lifetime, absent a world war. If anything we’re about to enter a period of absurd energy abundance we don’t yet know what to do with.
One of the benefits to carbon taxes is unironically rationing. We will run out of oil slower. We value keeping oil in the ground WAY too lowly, that basically preserves it indefinitely for free, in a form that doesn’t result in environmental chaos. I don’t know why people don’t think of oil in the ground as a strategic reserve.
But if you're a third world country trying to improve your quality of life fossil fuel is the most accessible. Until rich countries make other options cheaper and readily available.
Solar has made incredible strides but not sufficiently enough to replace fossil fuels. Civilian nuclear has been demonized and is not easily accessible.
I fail to see how we can reduce fossil fuel increase throughout the world without viable alternatives.
European are sacrificing themselves for no practical results. All in the name of appearances and what now counts as some perverted political correctness.
Living in London and seeing a visible build up of black dust on my window frames every month or two I'd like cleaner air.
That's a strong statement. Can you be more specific ? I live in the EU and I have no complaints related to Union-level climate policies.
Electricity is at an all-time high because we spend a huge amount of money making it "green". People can't even heat their houses in the winter. It's literally 13C inside right now at my parents house.
Meanwhile, France is deemed "un-green" because union-level climate policies mark cheap nuclear power as not "green", while Germany is burning biomass and expensive natural gas, therefore is tagged "green".
Union-level climate policies completely at fault here, and so are many government policies that are just an excuse to extract more taxes under the righteousness of "fighting climate change".
I don't know who is getting rich and achieving a better life out of this, but it's certainly not the European common citizen.
- Fuel taxes are national policy, not EU ?
- Electricity was stupid high mainly because of the war ? (and FWIW "green" is not yet king - given that there is still new coal capacity coming online [thanks, Poland] in spite of its utter stupidity)
- Agreed that natural gas policy is kind of all over the place - policy is lagging reality
The EU is not rich in own energy resources, so placing taxes & other restrictions imports keeps cash at home to plow into renewables - improving security of supply.
So I'm still not convinced that the EU has got it willfully wrong.
US is a large country with considerable amounts of coal (and oil to a lesser extent). China also owns a considerable amount of coal on their territory. Several African countries are significant oil producers. (overall even if it's oversimplifying: it makes sense that large countries with low density of population have larger amounts of natural resources per capita...)
Since EU imports > 95% of the fossil fuels it uses and since the volume of oil extracted from earth will soon peak and then decline (in a context where the countries who extract it will keep more and more for themselves, therefore even less to be available on the market), it is indeed wise that EU learns to organise with less fossil fuels (independently from any climate/environmental concerns, which are another good reason). If EU doesn't then it will anyway have to face such a decline, without being properly organised...