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Comment by faeriechangling | Hacker News Reader

All I hear in contemporary politics is how carbon taxes, already set low enough that they won’t stop increasing fossil fuel use, are too much and must be repealed. This point of view only gets more popular.

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.

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Carbon taxes need a good story for what happens to the tax revenue. Most of the time, advocates want to siphon the revenue into their pet cause, or pay off private interests. This makes an already bitter pill dead on arrival.

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.

> (One risk is poor folks might actually produce more carbon than the middle class, with older vehicles in disrepair and poorly insulated homes)

I would expect flights to be what really sets the average.

The problem with the dividend is that politicians will say something stupid like "we can't pay the dividends because we already spent the money".

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.

>we can't pay the dividends because we already spent the money

Carbon fee and dividend proposals often require almost all the money to not be possible to spend on anything besides the dividend.

Planned and sustainable economy is way to go, right now be have almost all the technologies required to create efficient plans

Soviet Union had almost all the technologies to create efficient plans.

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?

I don't think so, for eg computation that time is nowhere comparable of today's, computation, automation, information analytics etc

> People don’t seem to have the stomach to accept what’s coming

Whats coming?

If we look at doom&gloom predictions of "climate change" we see - objectively, none of those "whats coming" have happened.

Back in the aughts, a specific prediction of flooding in the NYC subway system in a decade was made. And then in 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit the area, flooding the subway, completing that prediction. It's now 2023 and NYC is flooding again.

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.

https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/view-indicators

Was that the first time the subway was flooded?

Are you implying wildfires never happened before? Or wildfires that “turn sky orange “ never happened before?

That isn't accurate at all. Books have been written since the early and mid-20th century about the effects of a technocratic society and the limits of growth, and those analysis and predictions have certainly come to fruition in various ways.

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...

> That isn't accurate at all. Books have been written since the early and mid-20th century about the effects of a technocratic society and the limits of growth, and those analysis and predictions have certainly come to fruition in various ways.

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.

What? Just this summer we had a string of the hottest days ever recorder for like 2 weeks. Last year temps were in the high 20°C's for up to mid-november. Once-a-decade wildfires now happen every year. Hurricanes destroy large parts of the southeast US every summer. Europe is starting to get hit by storms as well. The Gulfstream, arguably the single most important ocean current to the western world, is collapsing.

This isn't a matter of opinion; objectively, these things are happening, and there is no reason for them not to get worse.

This a bunch of emotional responses, if you pardon my bluntness. It it a matter of opinion and has nothing to do with the word "objectivity".

I would call for some historical data and do some data-backed comparisons, but given your emotional responses it likely will be pointless.

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