I think that it's important for free market advocates, myself included, to understand something. Negative third party externalities, having direct impacts on individuals that did not consent to the responsible transaction(s), are fully within the responsibility of the government to regulate and/or tax. You are not violating your principles by backing state intervention for environmental issues.
Beyond not just "not violating your principles," it's necessary accounting. If the public pays for part of the costs of something -- say of cleaning up after extraction or pollution -- you haven't accounted for its costs.
Without proper accounting, unprofitable businesses can thrive and would-be profitable businesses fail.
No economic system can sustain itself without proper accounting.
Even still, you're assuming the government has the ability to address climate change if given the chance. But, there would need to be global consensus and enforcement or government intervention could actually make the problem worse (e.g. heavy environmental regulatory burden means products get manufactured and shipped from Asia, and actually generate more carbon emissions).
Perhaps, free market solutions a la Tesla are all we've got?
> Perhaps, free market solutions a la Tesla are all we've got?
Tesla is still promoting the idea of the individual car, and that electric cars could replace the ICE car for each and every travel that it is used currently.
If Tesla is the free market solution, then be prepared to pay the bill for climate change.
Regarding transportation, it's in my comment. Put an end to the individual car and promote public transportation.
Replacing ICE cars with electric cars looks like it's better than nothing, but it's only gonna promote the business-as-usual mindset.
Today, even with limited electric car adoption, our energy consumption is growing faster than the production of electricity from renewables is growing. That means more energy from fossil fuels worldwide. We need to slow down until solutions are found.
Indeed. It’s unfortunate that what was originally a belief in the superiority of capitalism to organize a society to everyone’s benefit has morphed into blind support for existing, large businesses.
The best illustration in recent history are probably the attempts to insulate coal power from competition by renewables. Really makes you wonder if people don’t sometimes look in the mirror and wonder “wait, how did I end up here?”
Advocates of real free markets want a carbon tax. Externalities are a real problem and there is a lot of economics research on how to deal with it. The issue is that “right wing” has passed to signify “liberal”. There is nothing less liberal, or capitalistic, than most of the current right wing parties in western countries.
I think physicists can say they proven something but it is in principle debatable. Economy is just witchcraft in comparison - please do not give economy more credibility than it deserves.
> I think physicists can say they proven something
Not even them. It only makes sense to talk about proof in formal domains such as math and logic.
Science proves nothing. It is impossible to prove that any given scientific theory will not be falsified in the future. In fact, physics was one of the main inspirations for the idea of "paradigm shift" by Thomas Kuhn in his famous work "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".
Talking about proof in science is damaging, and it conveys the wrong idea about what science actually is.
Looking at (https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/2207/economics/carbon-tax...) the primary argument against Carbon tax is that companies will somehow tax evade even more than in the past, and companies will move to more tax friendly companies than they already do.
Is there an argument against carbon tax that can't be said by any other tax?
The easy way to implement a carbon tax is to tax at major sources, like coal mines and oil wells, and let the producers pass on the cost to everyone else. It's not terribly difficult to assess the amount of coal produced by a mine.
It's also fairly difficult to move a coal mine to another country. Of course, people could import their carbon-intensive goods, but most proposals include tariffs on countries without comparable carbon fees. Tariffs like these are explicitly allowed by trade agreements.
The objective of carbon tax is to give incentives to market participants and let the market to the job. In my opinion it will result in creating huge wealth transfers with much real benefit to the climate.
I would rather side with Naomi Klein that capitalism proved ineffective in solving problems of this scale.
Lucas got Noble prize for proving that market participants game new rules faster then regulators introduce them.
Pseudo-market solutions in healtcare (pricing procedures with ICD and allowing market participants compete) are currently proved as inefficient. Net gain for market participants but net loss for people and goverment budgets.
So my reservation is for carbon tax as gigantic wealth transfer without real benefits to climate. I am not against urgent action on climate.
Is a tax a regulation in that sense? I’m wary of non-tax responses to climate change for the reasons you suggest, I think they’re easy to game.
But with a tax you can only evade. The income tax still raises revenue and discourages income, even though it can be evaded and often is. I think a carbon tax would similarly raise revenue and discourage carbon, while letting us cut worse taxes like the carbon tax.
Doomsday messages are coming in in rapid succession. First the permafrost is melting 70 years earlier than expected, then Greenland losing massive amounts of ice, then glaciers that provide fresh water for hundreds of millions in India and China disappearing at an alarming rate, now this.
And still politicians do nothing. What we need is an effort to build renewables, insulate homes, and build charging infrastructure that rivals the Apollo program, what we get are "freedom molecules" and "clean coal".
Don't forget that all the insects (the single largest link in the animalian food chain) are dying.
Politicians long ago forgot that their job is to instigate improvement in society, and now relegate themselves to either decrying or defending the status quo. I'm beginning to fear that the Apollo program might actually be the greatest societal effort the US will ever undertake.
I’m not sure politicians have ever seen their jobs as instigating improvements to society. I think they see their job as to protect the interests of the biggest contributors to their campaigns. There was a time when that was organized labor, which is as close as you’re going to get to the “will of the people”, but now it’s mostly big business.
There did seem to be a tendency to try in the immediate post-war era. Even the right, hands off, side of politics were increasing state services and benefits. In no small part as a consequence of coming back from the war, so soon after the previous one, generating a widespread mood of "now we must do better". It mostly survived through the sixties, and finally died with the 73 oil crisis. That caused the chaos of the rest of the seventies that resulted in the course we're still on today.
Keep in mind the decimation of insect populations likely has very little to do with global warming and more to do with pollutions like agricultural insecticides, deforestation, etc.
Not just politicians. And still citizens do nothing. Meat consumption is rising (one of the best things we can do personally is stop eating meat and dairy). Travel is increasing. Consumption...
Because land-use change is a leading cause of climate change, and most land-use change is happening to grow and harvest animals. Add on top of that the monoculture crops are also largely grown to feed animals, and those monocultures also drive climate change.
Eating a plant based diet is great, but even switching to locally raised, pasture grown animals can be a positive. But ultimately pastures need to be re-wilded into natural forests. Beef needs to become an expensive luxury and not a dietary staple.
Agree about beef becoming an expensive luxury, but Oxford and CSIRO etc scientists have shown that pasture grown animals are worse for climate change. Sequestration doesn't cover their emissions...
http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-10-03-grass-fed-beef-good-or-b...
Why constraint yourself voluntarily instead of simply paying co2 tax? If meat production hurts climate, let’s just make it expensive (not the meat itself, but the process which produces co2) and let free market work towards stopping climate change.
Maybe you don’t eat meat but instead buying something else which hurts climate 20 times more? Nobody knows.
Well, that is the thing about hitting the ground— you can be milliseconds away and everything still looks fine. In a few decades, historians will be able to look back and identify the key events and turning points in all this. I suspect that the stuff we're seeing now will be eventually seen as part of the transition from "getting bad slowly" to "getting bad very quickly". But obviously it's hard to know without the full benefit of hindsight.
That's quite the non-sequitur. What relationship are you implying between this supposition and the scientific facts of climate change? Would your argument change if it were astronomers telling you an asteroid would hit in 5 years?
The problem is that the climate will be fucked beyond repair when ordinary people in rich countries feel the impact on their quality of life. We need to act way before that point.
Want to make a difference on climate change as a technologist? Feel free to join these communities actively looking for support and with ongoing projects (that are alive):
You should also take political action. With due respect to people who are trying to take positive individual action, it will not be enough. We've been waiting 30 years and people are still driving SUVs. Only large scale government policy can move the needle for an entire society. Maybe you have political views that you find that distasteful, but unfortunately we're running out of time, and you'll have to choose between your politics and your future.
SUVs are becoming more popular despite the serious danger they pose to our environment, both in terms of climate change and significant danger to every other user of the road.
Getting hit at 25mph is likely survivable if hit by a sedan (you'll land on the hood), but an SUV often flattens a person, as the force is applied to their mid to upper body rather than their legs.
Car accidents are also much more catastrophic, our current testing in the USA only tests SUVs against SUVs, sedans vs sedans in crashes, and impact absorbers on SUVs are often higher, meaning the SUV will end up atop a sedan in an accident.
These negative externalities are poorly regulated, permitting these needless deaths and injuries to occur.
If people don't want to be political now, they're really not going to like the choices (or lack thereof) left after politics have failed and the crisis, famines, and other impacts start to become apparent to the general population. Choices are what we are rapidly running out of.
GP said "You should also take political action", so this doesn't rule out individual action.
GP's key point is that individual action would not be enough and you're not actually addressing that argument by just saying that not everyone wants to be political and that other choices would be nice.
Thank you for the links. Need to check them out more later today to see where I can help, but from first view they all looks like "We want to do something about climate change, join us if you also want to", but not much about what they actually do.
Thank you. I have for a long time been thinking that it probably is some way for me to make a larger impact without going into politics, today I can start to be more involved
Following over 3 decades of gradual but uneven increases in sea ice coverage, the yearly average Antarctic sea ice extents reached a record high of 12.8 × 106 km2 in 2014, followed by a decline so precipitous that they reached their lowest value in the 40-y 1979–2018 satellite multichannel passive-microwave record, 10.7 × 106 km2, in 2017. In contrast, it took the Arctic sea ice cover a full 3 decades to register a loss that great in yearly average ice extents. Still, when considering the 40-y record as a whole, the Antarctic sea ice continues to have a positive overall trend in yearly average ice extents, although at 11,300 ± 5,300 km2⋅y−1, this trend is only 50% of the trend for 1979–2014, before the precipitous decline.
I don't quite follow the results being discussed here, but from my reading am I right in understanding that up until now there's been a gradual increasing trend in sea ice coverage in the antarctic, which is now (as of the latest results) drastically decreasing?
TLDR:
He went on to say that many climate models actually predict a short-term increase in Antarctic sea ice, under conditions of global warming. He spoke of factors such as increasing fresh water and higher wind speeds that promote ice growth and expansion, and, as is clear from this year’s Antarctic sea ice maximum, these factors appear to be dominating right now.
> The ice covers of each of the 5 sectors of Fig. 1 and of the Southern Ocean as a whole have experienced considerable interannual variability over the past 40 y (Figs. 2–7). In fact, the Southern Ocean and 4 of the 5 sectors (all except the Ross Sea) have each experienced at least one period since 1999 when the yearly average ice extents decreased for 3 or more straight years only to rebound again afterward and eventually reach levels exceeding the extent preceding the 3 y of decreases (Figs. 2–7). This illustrates that the ice decreases since 2014 (Fig. 2) are no assurance that the 1979–2014 overall positive trend in Southern Ocean ice extents has reversed to a long-term negative trend. Only time and an extended observational record will reveal whether the small increase in yearly average ice extents from 2017 to 2018 (Fig. 2C) is a blip in a long-term downward trend or the start of a rebound.
And:
> I hope that the 40-y record discussed in this paper will encourage further studies into the atmospheric and oceanic conditions that could have led to the extremely rapid 2014–2017 decline of the Antarctic sea ice cover, the comparably rapid decline in the mid-1970s, and the uneven but overall gradual increases in Antarctic sea ice coverage in the intervening decades.
Does that mean over 40 years ago it had an even lower area or that they are at all time lows (as far as we can tell)? Could account for why my grandparents are skeptical, they're like "yeah, yeah, this has all happened before, environmental political fads come and go..."
The 40-year timespan marks the boundary of the current measurement regime (satellite multichannel passive-microwave measurements). This isn't the first time it happens, but earlier measurements may not be directly comparable.
From the article:
The one other several-year period during the time frame of modern instrumental records with an estimated loss of hemispheric sea ice coverage comparably as rapid as [the current one was] in the mid-1970s. Calculations based on a variety of datasets [..] show rates of decrease of ∼600,000 km2/y for the 4 y from the start of 1973 to the start of 1977 and for the 3-y subset from the start of 1974 to the start of 1977
The concluding remark is helpful to reproduce in full:
I hope that the 40-y record discussed in this paper will encourage further studies into the atmospheric and oceanic conditions that could have led to the extremely rapid 2014–2017 decline of the Antarctic sea ice cover, the comparably rapid decline in the mid-1970s, and the uneven but overall gradual increases in Antarctic sea ice coverage in the intervening decades. More broadly, the environmental datasets may be nearing the point where they are long enough and rich enough to enable the linking of several of the modes and dipoles and oscillations now spoken of separately, just as the El Niño and Southern Oscillation phenomena were linked together years ago as ENSO; once that further linkage happens, the understanding of Earth’s very interconnected climate system, including the sea ice cover, could be markedly enhanced.
This skepticism is important. What is the timeline of these changes in temperature? Can we compare it to the changes 100 years ago? 500 years ago? 1000 years ago? 10,000 years ago?
Are we accounting for positioning and skewing of the sun (on it's natural cycle)?
So much more goes into temperature regulation than simply "carbon emissions", if we were to realistically tackle an environmental disaster I would point to the plastic waste in the ocean and the fish farms.
I posted this in another comment covering the Guardian's coverage, but figured I'd post here too in case it got lost as this seems like a more lively discussion.
Is there any indication what a 'tipping point' or irreversible positive feedback loop would look like once it had started? Would it resemble a graph such as in TFA? Or would perhaps not be an irreversible first swoop, so to speak, but instead oscillate deeper each time?
Unknowable and unlikely, perhaps, given that it's not happened before. But a part of me wonders what it looks like when we get to the point where the charts and graphs don't go back up again.
A related article on the thinning of Antarctic ice sheets [0]. So we've got the decrease in ice extent as well as thickness, which is equal to total volume decrease?
