
Time to Panic - byproxy
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/16/opinion/sunday/fear-panic-climate-change-warming.html
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graeme
Good article. I've long felt that people who accept climate change are
surprisingly complacent about it.

I suspect the nature of the problem is poorly understood. A lot of the focus
in north america is on personally reducing. This feels similar to not
littering, not spraying pesticides on your lawn, in other words not polluting
_locally_.

But CO2 isn't a local problem. It's global. Reducing use in one spot or making
use in a given case doesn't necessarily work. There's always a use for more
energy globally, so someone else with a lower standard of living will
justifiably want to take up what you don't use. Meanwhile, if a process is
made more efficient, this frees up energy to be used elsewhere in the system.
Jevon's paradox plays a role here too.

Global emissions are up, not down. Greatly up. Everything we've done so far
has accomplished precisely nothing on the global warming front. We are richer,
more people are out of poverty. Because we optimized for that, and not for
lower co2 production, globally.

The central issue is that co2 is cheaper than alternatives, in at least enough
cases that it's still widely used. Solar etc are dropping in cost, but not so
much that they've cut carbon.

A carbon tax would raise the price of co2 and encourage use of alternatives.
This could be combined either with an international agreement in other
countries to tax carbon, or a system of tariffs on countries that don't.

The system wouldn't be perfect, but it would actually stand a chance of having
us _switch_ to non carbon methods.

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cafebabbe
Sadly, I don't think clean energy will save us, even if deployed greatly.
Because we're fundamentally incapable of doing anything else - or even
imagining something else - than pursuing growth, renewables, so far, are
simply adding megawatts on top of fossil fuels, not replacing them.

People keep thinking about how technology will fix stuff. But technology
doesn't fix cultural or anthropological problems.

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graeme
If renewables/nuclear etc become cheaper such that no one would even _want_ to
use fossil energy, we can fix this.

If this doesn't happen or isn't possible, then we're likely doomed. A carbon
tax will make us discover whether we can survive or not sooner.

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cafebabbe
I really wish we did carbon tax thirty years ago. Now, it's likely too late -
we have 10 years to cut emissions in half, we (as in, the world) haven't even
started to do anything since the Paris accords, even in Europe - which doesn't
seem to concern many people, it's almost hilarious.

After that, all bets are off, we won't have the GDP for building the clean
grid of cheap renewables, and we'll switch to disaster capitalism. It's going
to be crop failures after flooding after deadly heatwaves after war after
diseases.

I honestly have a hard time figuring the best course of action, baring a
massive financial sector meltdown and a huge recession - and that's a very,
very shitty scenario, i'm not downplaying it.

But still way better than a world at 4 degrees.

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AndrewOMartin
Only two words away from the perfect clickbait title.

