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Comment by revscat | Hacker News Reader

This is only true if you do not factor in the longer-term costs of carbon emissions. Those emissions will eventually need to be dealt with, and the costs will be substantial. If those costs are addressed today via tax subsidies for zero-emissions vehicles then the future costs will be lower.

It is an "ounce of prevention" thing.

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Do you think the future costs are $7,500 per car though? Seems like we're still losing money on that. The actual argument, I think, is that this is just funding R&D for Tesla to make a better car in the future. That might actually be a good long-term investment.

Nope, but it does influence adoption rates, which was the goal of the subsidy.

If .01% of cars are electric and the chargers are not conveniently placed, then everyone will continue purchasing a ICE vehicle.

If 5% of cars are electric, then people will see the benefits and that the cars are practical, then people will be significantly more likely to consider an electric vehicle for their next purchase.

75 million per 10,000 electric vehicles? It's costly but it's necessary, and in my humble opinion, it will be well worth it.

The sooner we eliminate oil tankers and oil rigs, the better.

I don't know, what is the estimated monetary cost of destroying whole eco systems and the earth to boot? Whats the opportunity cost in fighting wars over oil instead of developing regenerative energy sources? What did it cost society to use leaded gas? Lead is one of the most neurotoxic substances on the planet, and an ever so slightly increased concentration in the blood can seriously hamper intellectual development. What price tag can we put on costing someone 10 IQ points?

The answer to all these questions, of course, is that it's impossible to correctly account for these things in the market without causing unfathomable transaction costs. This is after all the definition of a negative externality.

But I can tell you as much, $7500 is a freaking bargain.

If everyone who can afford to, buys an electric car next year, they will pay part of the $7,500 tax credit back in their regular taxes, making it less effective. Also, the people with lower incomes will have to make up the difference with their taxes (assuming the Fed doesn't just print more money, making us all poorer via inflation). It would make more sense to fund efficiency improvements for people who otherwise can't afford them, than to pay rich people to buy efficient cars.

> But I can tell you as much, $7500 is a freaking bargain.

Proof please. Show your working.

Average Miles Driven Per Year: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm 13,476 miles

Let's assume on the high side of 30mpg for a typical ICE vehice, so 449.20 gallons of gasoline per year.

Typical car lasts 10.8 years (http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/autos/story/2012-01-17/...).

That's 4851.36 gallons over the lifetime of the vehicle. A gallon of gas converts to 19lbs of CO2 when burned. That's 92175.84 lbs of CO2 over the lifetime of the vehicle, or ~46 tons of CO2.

If you're basing the economic benefit solely off of the amount of CO2 not being pumped into the atmosphere on a per car basis, it probably doesn't make sense. Don't forget the technologic (energy storage R&D) and energy security benefits though.

Disclaimer: TSLA stock owner.

The long-term costs of carbon emissions will be a public cost. It follows a pattern that has become quite common recently in America, where the profits are kept by the company and shareholders, while the costs are borne by the public.

So don't be surprised that the Cato institute discounts that fact, since their funding comes from industries that can only survive by perpetuating this system.

"...the costs will be substantial..."

This is an article of faith for the green crowd. I and many others are skeptical of such a claim, especially when temperatures have dropped despite higher emissions the past 10 years.

"temperatures have dropped despite higher emissions the past 10 years."

Please link to a source for this claim.

Update: I'm not seeing this drop you are talking about.

http://vortex.accuweather.com/adc2004/pub/includes/columns/c...

This is probably relevant

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/why-the-globe-hasnt-warme...

"The answer, according to a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters, is that a lot of it is being stored in the deep ocean, more than a half-mile down[...] [b]ut sooner or later it will inevitably emerge, which means that the current slowdown in warming may well be balanced by a period of rapid warming in a few years — nobody knows how many — from now."

I think he meant that the global rate of increase in temperature has dropped, ie temperature has hardly changed in the last 10 years.

> Ordinarily, heat trapped by greenhouse gases would warm the ocean’s surface water, but since warm water floats on top of colder water, the heat would have a hard time percolating to the depths. “You need something to push it down,” Trenberth said. That something could easily be strong prevailing winds, which can literally stir things up — or in this case, down.

This article is claiming that "the Globe Hasn’t Warmed Much for the Past Decade" because the wind is blowing the heat energy down into the depths of the ocean?

That's what they think, based on their CFD models. Before reading this I was thinking that, since warming has increased overall liquid sea-water volume globally, more CO2 was being dissolved in the sea or something, and that's why despite higher emissions more of it was being dissolved into the sea than going into the atmosphere. But then there is only so much you can dissolve, and that's why the last ten years of minimal warming is just a plateau.

Do these models yield testable predictions?

Will they actually be tested against acceptance criteria defined in advance?

>This is an article of faith for the green crowd. I and many others are skeptical of such a claim, especially when temperatures have dropped despite higher emissions the past 10 years.

Am I reading the graph wrong?

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A.gif

Looks like a rise to me.

Source: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/

access denied

It looks flat to me over the last decade. It's hard to tell with such a large time series.

The quote you're responding to said "past 10 years". Strictly speaking, that's accurate. You can play with the chart here - this is a chart of an average of several global temperature series over exactly the last 120 months, with trendline:

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/last:120/plot/wti/last:...

Your scientific background and a link to your source would be helpful, because the vast majority of people who study this issue disagree with you.

>especially when temperatures have dropped despite higher emissions the past 10 years

How do you figure? 2012 was the hottest year on record.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/01/130109-warme...

Or 2011:

>The WMO, part of the United Nations, said the warmest 13 years of average global temperatures have all occurred in the 15 years since 1997.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/29/us-climate-confere...

2012 was the hottest year on record

... for the continental US. Carbon is a global issue.

These debates are tiring. (Some) people on both sides will use whatever argument suits the current narrative, even if it disagrees with other arguments they make at later times. Compare what happens during a heat wave or a cold snap.

>.. for the continental US.

Fair point. It does, however, ignore the second link which was for global averages.

>In both cases, scientists said the 2012 global temperature records further consolidate a pattern of global warming. Each year of the 21st century has ranked among the 14 hottest since record keeping began in 1880.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jan/16/2012-10-wa...

The claim that temperatures have dropped for the past ten years seems to be patently false from the data I'm finding.

They haven't dropped. Global temperatures have been flat, though. You can see how the article makes a quote that doesn't disagree with that by using weird other metrics.

I've seen the climate scientists' explanation for this and why it doesn't disagree with global warming and it doesn't set off my BS detectors (i.e., they seem like good explanations, but there are certainly ways they could lie to me and I couldn't detect it). Their direct statements are a much better source than the media's game of telephone with their reports.

>They haven't dropped. Global temperatures have been flat, though.

That still doesn't seem to hold true. This is the UN WMO's report for 2012, direct; the graphs on pages 6 and 7 are particularly relevant:

http://library.wmo.int/pmb_ged/wmo_1108_en.pdf

>I've seen the climate scientists' explanation for this and why it doesn't disagree with global warming and it doesn't set off my BS detectors (i.e., they seem like good explanations, but there are certainly ways they could lie to me and I couldn't detect it).

I'd certainly be willing to take a look if you could provide a source.

I can see someone disagreeing, but those two graphs look pretty flat for 2000-2010. Certainly no overall "up" or "down" trend. (Or, if there's one, then it keeps on swapping turns with the other.)

The explanation was having to do with local cycles, I believe. I didn't grok it well enough to understand it or else I would have presented it; it was, however, decent enough to pass my "this is BS" filter. A lot of things don't.

It's not an "article of faith", it is a scientific certainty, and one that we are witnessing happen today, not in some vague future.

especially when temperatures have dropped despite higher emissions the past 10 years

Could you please provide a citation or otherwise indicate where this information is coming from.

that temperatures have dropped (or more accurately, shown negligible warming) in "the past 10 years" is pretty easy to check. Um, try this site:

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/last:120/plot/wti/last:...

(Note that the "woodfortrees index" is a composite that combines a variety of standard temperature series, the better to avoid arguments as to which series to use. But if you're especially partial to one series or another, you can select those too. eg, here's Hadcru4 global mean: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/last:120/plot/ha... )

(the samples are monthly, so specifying "120 samples" gets you exactly ten years, starting and ending near the same (most recent) month.)

Okay, lets just pretend global warming is 100% certainly non-existant. That being the case, do we still not care about pollution? Have you seen China lately? People can't even go outside on certain days. If you don't believe those costs are substantial than there is simply no talking logic into you.

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