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Is a Carbon Tax a Good Idea?
.-.-.- (aka Fullstop) asks: "Cosmos Magazine is reporting that the rate of carbon dioxide emissions has more than doubled since the 1990's. Several researchers fear increased levels may be unstoppable. Australia's national science agency, CSIRO flatly states that current carbon reduction efforts are just not working. Add to this heady mix the fact that Toyota is pushing for a carbon tax and Australia, and the UK, are currently considering one, and a trend begins to emerge. If current reduction methods are not working what will? The United States currently employs a voluntary carbon reduction scheme based on market trading, with very limited corporate participation. Is a carbon tax a good way to stabilize emissions in the face of heretofore failed efforts at stabilization?"
I was watching the Colbert Report the other day and the CEO from Timberland was on there explaining his carbon neutral stance and he sounded quite avid about it. He was clearly agitated from Steven's persona of a right wing nut who couldn't understand. It was more awkward than funny.
But it caused me to wonder what would happen if I urged the big company I work for (and it is multi-national) to go carbon neutral. Well, on the surface, we don't burn anything. But I thought harder about the thousands of computers we must operate and the kilowatt upon kilowatt of power that is most likely used by each facility. Ok, so (since we can't assume the power company is adjusting for it) we offset the power consumption through planting some trees. Well, how many trees and how much land would this cost? And what about the thousands of computers we buy yearly from Dell or IBM? What about the plastics that go into the casings? And what about the companies that they buy the chips from and where do they buy the ore that's refined to make the silicon chips?
The more I taxed my brain with this possible carbon neutral proposition, the more it looked like this was going to require a lot of resources. Resources being money. And while we're doing this, some other IT company isn't and we're competing with them to do business with our customers. So my proposition might be passed around at the office as a joke until the CTO got ahold of it and thought about the shareholder and rejected it.
So before any of you say a carbon tax is stupid because consumers will start to buy the most environmentally friendly products, you're simply wrong. The only way they'll buy it is if the environment is having direct negative impacts on their business. And the irony is that if it does negatively affect their business that means lost profits. And lost profits means they'll have less money to spend on their solutions. So our environmentally friendly services with a carbon neutral company will probably be out of the question if they're more expensive. Tell me, when you buy your computer or your Xbox360/PS3/Wii or your new processor, does carbon neutrality figure into your pricing at all? I'll bet it doesn't.
And at the end of the day, my coworkers will tell me that there's X number of companies that are worse than us so I shouldn't even worry about it. Or that we don't even need to worry about that because it's the people who make our tools that should be conscious. But we do need to at least think about it. We might even need to worry about it more than others because we're the least obvious target yet the largest base of carbon output. Take Wal-Mart for example. Just look at the trucks they use for their distribution centers. 500 distribution centers across the states with probably thousands of stores--all of those places being supplied regularly from the coasts and producers by truck. Such an easy thing to overlook--especially if they contract those truckers because then it's not their fault, it's not their conscious and they can have articles hailing them as the greenest distribute in the world while the contractor doesn't care because they're doing business with the largest distributor in the world.
I'm not going to tell you whether or not a carbon tax is a good idea. I'm just going to ask you to tell me what scenario would have to go down for an entire industry to collectively switch to being carbon neutral. And I mean that everybody has to be on board because it will affect price. And when that price goes up, if it doesn't go up across the board, consumers will on average opt for the cheaper product. What would have to be happening to make that consumer stay away from non-carbon neutral compa
My work here is dung.
that attempts to reduce consumption of unsustainable energy is worth a shot. If people only respond to the cost of something - if it takes a tax that makes other solutions relatively cheaper - then it's worth investigating.
It will help a lot in the cubicles ! ;)
-- Rastignac was here.
I am a firm believer in capitalism. The market will come up with a good solution.
But the market can only function if all costs involved are part of the price. One way to do this is to have a CO2 tax, provided it is based on the actual CO2 cost of the product, and the money is used to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Then the market can decide what to do.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
So are the many other ideas out there for reducing global emissions.
Ultimately they will all fail if China is not brought on board.
Australia is seeing massive drought and topsoil erosion due to boneheaded land-management schemes encouraged by the government. The Amazon basin is seeing largescale deforestation due to clearcutting for pastureland as well as hardwood harvesting for construction. Europe is vastly overpopulated and over-farmed that the net margins for farming have gone negative in areas accessible by car.
The only large land area that has not yet succumbed to land overuse is North America and that's mostly due to the sheer size of the land vs the population. At current consumption levels, a land teeming (as Europe teems) with people would consume the resources of the American landscape and pollute it past the point of no return. You know what that is? That's the point in a journey where it's harder to go back to the beginning than to continue on to the end. It's like when those astronauts got in trouble when they were going to the moon. Somebody messed up or something and they had to get them back to Earth but first they had to go around the moon. They were out of contact for hours. Everybody waited breathlessly to see if a bunch of dead guys in a can would pop out the other side. Well, we're just about to slide past the moon and there's only one country that can change our course.
China.
I pay enough taxes already. I own a decently efficient car, I ride a train to work (well, I drive 10 miles to the train station each day), and I don't drive much on weekends. If you're going to make a "carbon tax", make it for those assholes that commute 50 miles a day in a Ford Expedition. I have enough taxes already.
Comment of the year
If part of an industry that is (very) close to the cause of pollution suggests to take certain actions that mostlikely will cost them money in the short run, then you know something is wrong.
No sane man would shoot himself in the foot.
At the moment, it's humans who are taxed, human work. Well, tax machine work instead. They do more of the work than we do and they have an unfair tax advantage over humans, never mind their ability to work so much faster.
http://www.whynot.net/ideas/2195
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how do you know how much CO2 is being dispensed by various companies? Do we seal plants in plastic baggies and measure the CO2 coming out? And what exactly would the tax revenue go towards?
It depends on which you think is a greater threat:
Only one of those threats has occurred many times before, is certain to occur again, and is certain to wipe us out when vegetation falters. Guess which one?
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
Redically reducing our use of fossil fuels is what we need to be doing. The local (and possibly global?) environmental implications are obvious, but for the West the elimination of a financial base of many unstable or anti-Western regiemes has political and economic benefits. I like Richard Branson's strategy to invest heavily in alternative fuels and transport technology.
Any tax should have extremely rigid rules about how the money would be used and accounted for. Extra cash in politicians coffers is the last thing we need. The money should be used to invest and subsidize productive research in alternative fuels.
The amount of carbon released into the atmosphere can vary widely between man-made and natural sources. For example:
Granted, man is basically behind the burning in Borneo...
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
The first question that comes up in my mind is how this will be enforced. Are we going to send inspectors _everywhere_ to measure carbon emissions?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I'm not holding my breath.
Environmentalists hate the only real solution (nuclear power in case you're doubting that) even more.
It supposedly costs even more, because it costs "infinite" because of the supposed need to maintain storage infinitely. But that way of thinking just ignores progress completely.
And have you seen the movies about nuclear power ? Obviously it's evil !
At the very least, nuclear power can bridge the gap in energy supply until fusion power becomes available.
The EU ETS is badly implemented at the moment, but it really just needs tweaked a bit. Reduce the caps, allocate on a per capita basis rather than allow governments to decide how much to allocate.
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One of the leading campaigners in this area is George Monbiot, he has thought about how industrialised countries can make a 90% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030.
In a recent article entitled Here's the Plan he set out 10 steps to achieve this while changing our every day life as little as possible.
Instead of carbon tax he suggests:
This scheme would not penalise the poor as carbon taxes might because they would be able to sell off their surplus rations.
I believe in biofuels. Grow crops, optionally process them, and you've got fuel that's carbon neutral when you burn it. If you choose your crops right, this can be cheaper than burning fossil fuels. Harmful emissions are also reduced (there's loads of crap in fossil fuels).
The biggest problem with biofuels at the moment is that we aren't choosing our crops right: we're using crops with low energy yields (soy, maize, rape seed), and heavily subsidizing them and/or taxing (foreign) alternatives (e.g. sugar cane) to make our crops "competitive". The effect is, of course, that it costs society money (even those who don't use the crops we grow) and keeps other countries poor. That's no way to go.
If we get serious about biofuels, produce them at their real cost using crops with good energy yield and/or the ability to grow on marginal land (algae, switchgrass, sugar cane, sweet sorghum), that will be a good step in the right direction. If fossil fuels are still cheaper at that point (which I could well imagine being the case for coal), we could always impose a environment tax at that point. However, let's look at the real costs, without taxes, subsidies, and foreign policy, first.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
1. Make hybrid car with less carbon-exhaust
:) (smug mode off) Prrrt... snifff... ah...
2. Promote hybrid car, get people interested
3. Lobby for law that taxes carbon-exhaust
4. ???
5. Profit !
(smug mode on)Lucky I already drive one
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
carbon tax is a way for centralised power broadcasters which are producing polution to effectively be paid to further their activities. fuel, car, power industries are resisting change and using doublethink to persuade people that a carbon tax is an investment in change.
i would be far more interested in a carbon free tax which invested in distributed power generation (with less loss of power over distance to deliver) which provided people with investment in developing and applying better technologies for contributing to the power grid themselves. solar, wind, tidal.
it might take a while for these distributed meshes of power to be self sufficient for all purposes, but thats where the investment should be. a distributed powergrid has less single point of failure issues
less wastage as power is used closer to where it is generated, and uses energy which naturally persists.
And let me tell you one thing: most big companies can afford to lose money for a couple of years in order to lower their pollution rate -- sure, it's going to be painful, but everyone will benefit in the log term. Oh, and no outsourcing polluting plants to poorer countries either: the tax should be levied globally, if necessary by using estimates. Outsourcing to, say, India, in order to pollute freely? Sorry, bub, all your plants in India are now considered as "high" or "extremely high pollution": that will US$ 45 million. On the other hand, extremely efficient and non-polluting industries will win.
Still ideally, I'd like the revenue from these taxes to be used to plant trees, create recycling and de-polluting plants, and optimize natural resource usage. Other worthy uses are scientific and technical: developing renewable resources and developing the technologies needed to clean behind us most of the pollutants we have been dumping on Earth for the past 100+ years.
The key point is this: whether you believe in Global Warming or not (I do) the fact is that the Earth is Dying(tm). If we don't force the big companies -- and the individual citizens -- to face up to this fact, all solutions we'll apply to this problem will be too little, too late. There are solutions available right now . Carbon Tax is one of them, and it's probably one of the most effective.
And... Wait for it... Creating new technologies and optimizing our resources consumption may actually increase the wealth of everyone, by creating new jobs and improving/cleaning our habitat.
Of course, I am not holding my breath: most politicians will never have the guts nor the gonads to sign a Carbon Tax into law. We'll probably come around to it once the Earth is so polluted and the climate so out of whack it will taxation or death.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
The whole idea of basing China's output using a "per person" formula is just dumb. Its being done to mask the amount of pollution China is creating, supposedly they will exceed the US within 2 years (finding that citation should not be too hard)
A "tax" won't do anything but pass the costs to the consumer indirectly. Worse most schemes invented allow for corporations to buy and sell "pollution credit" with other companies. In other words, a tax just furthers the activity. Instead of stopping it you just make it slightly more expensive to maintain.
No tax. Just set reasonable emission's goals based on the industry involved. There is no real point in forcing a computer manufacturer to pay penalities just because their power supplier isn't green. Now you can hit them up if they refuse to use better alternatives for creating boards and such (reduce mercury usage is a start). This is the logic that needs to be followed for each industry. Get on to it for what it produces, not what it consumes. If you hit it on the consuming side then you are just passing the regulatory buck. Your hitting them for something they may have no actual ability to control. Of course most governments are only concerned with revenue so its a wash. They will portray and financial loss to a corporation as the cost of doing business while convienently ignoring the fact that any "penalty tax" paid by the corporation is ultimately paid by anyone buying their product or engaged in businees with someone using their product (the old idea of - no business pays taxes, they merely collect them for the government)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
in ... say 1986 ?
If you subtract those people who are receiving money from fossil fuel companies, then as far as I know there is a total consensus on this issue. In fact, even among those people who DO receive money from the fossil fuel companies, you'll find several scientists who admit that fossil fuel emissions are increasing the Greenhouse Effect. (Go to the bottom of this article and see Pat Michaels arguments against Global Warming. Basically it's that "That number [the amount of global warming] is significantly low, and it suggests to me that this becomes a self-limiting issue in the following way: 100 years from now, the technology that runs our society, and powers our society, is going to be radically different than it is today. It will almost certainly be a more efficient, maybe not even a carbon-based fuel society.")
Now, I know people will call this an ad hominem attack, but if it is, it's valid. Just as it was valid to point out that those scientists who denied that smoking was bad for were being funded by tobacco companies. I say it's valid because for the majority of people who don't actually understand the science themselves, they need to consider the biases of those who provide the information. One on hand you have scientists being largely funded by an administration that has very weak on climate issues, but who still find very strong evidence to support the greenhouse gas theory, and on the other hand you have scientists being funded by ExxonMobil and friends who try to find faults with those arguments. It's also worth pointing out that this same group of scientists first denied global warming was happening, then suggested that it's not due to greenhouse gases, and is now claiming that it's not really that big of a problem. So, if you don't understand the science, who do you believe?
Personally, I understand the science fairly well. But it's hard to convince those who don't understand it without pointing out to them why some scientists might be deceiving them (either deliberately or otherwise).
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Before anyone starts on about the need for a carbon tax, we need to address the Billions that go into subsidizing our consumption habits. I'm speaking of Americans in particular, beyond the war on "terror", highway funding, and preferential tax status of oil companies, we also directly subsidize these companies that are taking us for billions in retail.
I say eliminate all of the special subsidies, odd tax loopholes, and other artificial advantages that make Fossil fuel desireable. And then the market will finally be able to sort it all out.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
So, are you suggesting that perhaps the car industry is willing to shoot "themselves in the foot to get out having to kill other people"? You might be right! :)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
So, basically, you're suggesting a grandfather clause? Countries that are already industrialized get to continue benig industrialized, but those who aren't can't become industrialized because you set their emission goals based off them not being industrialized? You are familiar with the history of grandfather clauses, aren't you?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
carbon trading is just a way for the wall street swindlers to get their middleman skimming fingers into other pies. We have more than enough derivatives gambling now. Let them go get real jobs. Work to de-parasite the economy, that will do the most to help...
I am pro environment, pro alternative energy, pro sustainable living as much as possible, etc, but man I don't want to see global carbon trading as we don't need any more global unelected bureaucratic government or fascist corporate pirates running things, take the power back from those goons. Look at the mess the WTO is, or the IMF for some more examples. Carbon trading is a way to make millionaires into billionaires, that's it.
If you as an individual or business want to "go green", there's nothing stopping you. You can buy solar in various forms, solar PV or solar thermal, you can arrange for bulk buying of alternative vehicles (employee credits perhaps, or tell your local dealer you might go for a small fleet as soon as they have PLUGIN hybrids for sale, etc, help send that message up the car food chain), you can go buy stock in alternative energy companies, you can buy green electricity by making sure the big windmill guys get their cut, you can actually slap a few solar panels on your own roof, or get the remodelers in and do better windows and more insulation in your home, etc. Just do it. Plant some shade trees on the south side of your house. Lobby your local governmental authority to get building codes change that require better insulation and stronger construction. All sorts of stuff you can do. Support your most local farmers, buy from them or the local co-op instead of the big chains. Plant a veggie garden. And so on. Skip the home theater this year and put up a small wind charger. Whatever loats your boat. Vote with your wallet and your actions. Early adopters get the benefits of being early adopters.
They need to pay for blocking my line of sight.
When an SUV cuts me off, I call in the plate as a drunk driver. You should do the same!
Blar.
Although the Bush administration has been far too quiet about it, what has been said by them mainly supports the position of non-ExxonMobil supported scientists - namely, that anthropogenic global warming is real. That said, their silence is almost deafening. Also, I did understand that your point was a lack of communication and am in no way suggesting that you are contributing to the misinformation. As such, it's a valid point as many scientists have a hard time communicating with the general populace, and our government doesn't seem to have the willpower to do the communicating, either.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
... No exemptions for China or Russia or any other nation, some form of emissions trading that can be setup as a global framework ala Bretton Woods, is politically and economically tenable. Each nation would be allocated a certain tonnage of carbon-based gases, and they'd choose how those allocations are parceled out.
Oh, and a commitment to converting 50% of the world's coal-fired power plants to nuclear by 2020 is a must.
With all taxes the question is not whether it is good or bad. Almost all taxes have a negative influence influence on the economy seen in isolation. On the other hand, almost all government spending has a positive influence on the economy. And obvious and popular combination, spending without taxing, is very positive on the short term, but undermines the entire system on the long term.
The real question for any tax is therefore, are the consequences of the tax worse or better than other taxes.
It is quite simple to analyse: Which actions does the tax encourage, and which actions does the tax discourage.
A good frame of reference for other taxes is income tax since it constitute such a large fraction of the whole tax income. So the question becomes: Is the tax better or worse than income tax. Income tax happens to be a particularly harmful tax, it basically punish people for working. It is the last thing any government with an interest in a sound economy should be interesting in discouraging.
A carbon tax takes money out of the economy, which is harmful the way all taxes are. It also discourage the use of fossil foil, which may or may not have some beneficial effect on climate, but certainly lessens the economy's dependence on political stability in the middle eastern region. And it encourage research and development in alternative energy and conservation to happen earlier than a simple supply and demand curve on the fossil fuel reserves (known and hidden) would suggest.
All in all, as taxes go, a carbon tax is far from the worst.
PS: A common argument against any new tax is that it encourage enlarging the budget, which is a very valid point in any country with a tradition for having a balanced budget.
I've attempted to say before much the same as what you've just eloquently posted, but nowhere near as well. Well said!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Plus there's the slight problem of what to do with all the nuclear waste. It's going to be a burden on generations upon generations to come. But if you're the kind of moral slime mold that believes in taxing your children and grandchildren by borrowing to maintain your lifestyle, then sticking it to even later generations is an easy choice.
>regenerative workout machines which do not dissipate your work during fitness exercise but
>instead stores it in usable form, (i.e. charge batteries or put power back to grid)
My pet concept has been for an exercise bike hooked to a generator - powering the TV you can watch while pedaling to nowhere.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I knew politicians would eventually find a way to tax breathing.
The Kárahnjúkar hydroelectric dam is in Iceland, not China. And while there are strong objections from environmentalists, I also doubt that 60,000 people have died as a result of this project.
And this got modded up to +4 insightful?
Any CO2 tax applied in one country will force energy hungry industries to move offshore. Total CO2 production will not change. Local economy will suffer.
You can dump free trade pirate globalism and go back to tariffs at the borders and achieve two things: the massively polluting nations products can be boycotted or have such high tariffs imposed on them it is no longer in their economic interest to pollute. You can make your own cleaner products more attractive, and stop exporting your currency. Look at US-china trade, it is a no win situation for the US now that china is slowing down rebuying dollars. In fact, the US is not now their primary export market, the EU is (something most people don't even know yet). They have stated quite clearly that sitting on one trillion dollars of US IOUs is more than enough and they aren't that interested any longer, and that is the only way these cheap trinkets have kept pouring in. All they want now is for the US to finish transferring the very last of the highest tech family jewels(in the economic news the past few days), than that is it, after they get that stuff they could walk away from the US market, even walk away from the dollar and nothing would happen to them, because they have now built up their own infrastructure, a century's wqorth in only two decades due to the west giving it to them, and their own internal markets combined with the energy exporting nation's markets are now large enough to keep their manufacturing going, and for them to get paid with tangibles and not IOUs
This is THE most important economic situation we are in now, and thankfully more than a few economists are starting to say it out loud. When you see the bulls start mumbling about it after years of the bears roaring, you know the con is about to switch.
They have been playing the west for suckers and the billionaires have pushed this because of the massive skim they got to pull off.
All we have done is smash the US manufacturing economy in exchange for massive debt and making the wall street swindlers richer. Nuts. It has only taken 20 years, now we have record levels of billionaires and everyone else has *debt*. worst savings ever, most debt. This is not a "good" economy, we are running on fumes now,we have been eating our seed corn for years. We have a fairly strong EPA and OSHA and so on, yet we encourage buying products from other places that don't, yet somehow we now need to be concerned with CO2???
If we really were, we never would have allowed the lopsided tariffs (that still exist in china's favor), nor allowed the massive R&D technology transfer with zero counterfeiting enforcement-none.. We have traded two decades of cheap trinkets bought with IOUs on our children's and grand children's labor for a borked economy that could actually *collapse* and the pollution has just gotten worse. We PAID to have our economy trashed and to make pollution worse. Double stupid.
Credit is NOT the same as productivity, despite their claims that it somehow magically is. If anyone wants to dispute that, go to your bank, see if you can keep borrowing money and use the old loan paper for collateral to get more money from the same bank, see how long before they tell you "no, that's pretty stupid and we won't do that".
As this relates to carbon tax, you have to assume some rich swindler fatcats already own all the carbon, to even have a starting point to trade from. I say they DON'T and they shouldn't.
We have enough incentive to go green from selfish interest, IF we stop listening to the globalists. Being self sufficient in energy is a a GOOD idea. Not having all your energy eggs in one basket is a GOOD idea. Having a well diversified economy is a GOOD idea. Waking up to the fact that pollution in general is a bad idea and a health issue is a GOOD idea. If it helps with global warming, so much the better. The fastest growing segment of the automobile market is hybrids, because people want them, because they realise that better mileage is just a good idea, no matter how that happens. Getting cleaner air is nice frosting on the cake, so it works.
Carbon trading is another scheme for the pirate central bankers and wall street goons to keep their ponzi schemes going so they don't have to get real productive jobs, and that's it.
Yes, you could even power a computer instead of TV and make ultimate cross country cycling simulation game, with uphills and downhills, rough terrain, etc... nice marriage of arcades and gyms!
Heey, it is a nice concept! It can be expanded to other sports simulations (i.e. a rowing competition), a lot of fun, sporty, you can have various levels of strength and skill...
I'm not sure I've ever said this before, but for the most part I agree with both the parent and the gp. And the next root post down that talks about how important China is. (And India too)
I'd like to add the concept of taxation simplicity, though. As an example, you generally don't want to make, say, a tax on computers because then you make it important whether someone defines something as a computer. Is an XBox a computer? You don't want to put the government in the business of deciding how much carbon you spent - at best you want a situation where you present them with data following their accounting rules and they occasionally audit you - like the IRS.
You want to tax what's important to you. Carbon-neutrality is NOT important. Carbon-reduction IS important. (The distinction is between binary or an open ended scale. Getting rid of more is better.) So you don't want a tax on something that isn't carbon neutral, you want a taxation system that taxes adding carbon and credits removing it.
I'd suggest that we need an import tariff on goods that can't verify their carbon and pollutant status - and if they can have a few different gradations. This is extra good because it addresses a major imbalance of free trade. There will be some cheating, but over time you tighten up the rules and increase the amounts.
Domestically, you don't want to try to account for the carbon status of every home. A nonrenewable energy tax does a similar job in many ways, so I'd start with that. It's already metered at the power station or at the pump, so that's an advantage.
Then you need to systematically address practices that release carbon and pollutants in disproprotion to the amount of energy they use and figure out similar ways to tax them.
Certainly you should also reward carbon-negative practices, like a tax credit for private forests over a certain size - or installing filters that remove the CO2 somehow.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
What are some of those dangerous ideas, that sound good but actually aren't?Pretty much anything involving a politician. Har Har...
Really, politicians shouldn't be involved at all before the whole thing has been worked out by scientists, economists etc. It should then be presented to the politicians as "the solution" in a way they'll understand. Otherwise they'll fuck it up, they'll take the problem and go use it as "leverage" to gain additional funding which will then be spent in irrelevant and probably counter productive ways for example, the red herring which is the hydrogen economy and hydrogen fuel cells. The key point being the gaining of additional powers and revenue.
Deleted
Karahnjukar is in Iceland, not China, and it's highly unlikely that it's killed anyone since it hasn't even filled up yet.
EDUCATE YOURSELF!
2 .pdf/
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2 006/11/04/BUG07M5S481.DTL/r y06111704.htm/
$31.5 Trillion Investor Coalition, the Carbon Disclosure Project, Spurs Disclosure of Climate Change Strategies from World's 500 Largest Companies: http://www.cdproject.net/
Learn about how reducing greenhouse gases is GOOD for business! Carbon Down, Profits UP, a report by the Climate Group: http://www.theclimategroup.org/assets/CDPU_2005_v
Learn about how cap and trade works and how it effectively solved the acid rain problem under the U.S. Clean Air Act - COST-EFFECTIVELY: http://www.epa.gov/airmarkets/trading/basics/inde
And most importantly, climate change is inextricably linked to national security and energy independence. A carbon constrained economy equates to opportunites and investments in a host of clean and efficient energy technologies that are good for all. That's why Silicon Valley is saying that clean tech is the best investment of the 21st century! Just do a little research. The stuff we're told about economic impact of GHG reductions is hogwash.
Just a couple recent articles:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/
http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/2006/commenta
It's not a good idea. A solution, and a real one, is.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
...it's the power.
A global tax on anything will legitimize, fund and empower the one-world-government Cum-By-Yah crowd in one simple step.
Then we can all live happily ever after as their serfs.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
He noted that American and European manufactures have a cost that Chinese manufacturers don't. You seem to be under some delusion that American industry pollutes far more per unit of product that anybody else. Americans consume tons of crap we shouldn't, and can fairly take the blame for that (i.e. we are the impetus for pollution, though not necessarily the source). But as for pollution per unit of production, we're about the same as Europe. China doesn't compare so well. What, you think they have some magic method that lets them manufacture without making toxics? Nope. As a matter of fact, they use dirtier processes AND fewer emission controls. The net release to the environment from China is actually higher even in absolute terms than the US or Europe in many categories. So here's the dude's point rephrased: assuming consumption remains constant, it's a net pollution increase to encourage more products to be made where there is more pollution per unit of production. Use tarrifs to encourage production where there is less pollution per unit of production. But if you'd like to use your bad assumptions and math, by all means do. But keep it to yourself. And for your phobia of trangenetics, uh, you've never heard of endogenetic viruses have you? Dude! You're transgenic, your cat is, your dog is, the organic vegetables and grains you eat are. Born that way. Ever caught a cold or flu? Hey, you just became a little more transgenic.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Won't someone think of the trees????
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Industry doesn't want unsafe reactors. There's no money in that. It's often the multiple layers of safety features and procedures at nuclear power plants that make them more unsafe. For example, Three Mile Island mistakes were traced to a safety tag flopping down over the gage that indicated a problem. The shear complexity added by all the safety features makes monitoring very difficult.
But other designs don't require the safety systems. Pebble bed reactors for instance. Tests in Germany over a decade ago showed that they system was self regulating in the event of a breakdown of all the other systems.
So why do we use less safe designs? Because of regulations. Regulations that say you have to use the old designs.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Adjustments like Mel Bartholomew's square foot gardening method. But what happens when municipal dictators use misguided zoning ordinances against gardeners, telling such "dirty farmers" to "go back to the country"? People in not all countries are as free as some people imagine people in the United States to be.
A car that's twice as efficient means that oil runs out in sixty years, not thirty. And doesn't it still take a lot of fossil energy to build one of these hybrid cars?
Those are made from crops, and conventional farming in the United States requires fertilizer made from fossil fuel.
Peak coal happens in 2150. Coal is useful in power plants that harness economies of scale in turning each pound per hour of coal into one kilowatt of electric power. However, as I understand it, electric power isn't too useful for commuting barring some breakthrough in battery energy-to-mass ratio.
If historical eugenic efforts and the current policies of the People's Republic of China are anything to go by, then reduction of the human population is highly politically incorrect.
But will the human body's own thermoregulation be able to keep up? Or will the tropical zone become nearly unlivable? (Air conditioning relies on fossil power.) What about the thermoregulation of other existing species of flora and fauna?
Duh, we'll just have to pass a bill through congress that implements a carbon tax in China and India only!
Where do I sign up for one of those cushy political advisor jobs?Start in the US customs department.
That's doable. The government could just lay a tax per joule on the sale of any fossil fuel to users. The US federal government and state governments already do this with motor fuels (petrol and diesel).
Nuclear plants generate electricity. This is very good, because it means they're displacing coal, but they're not a solution to vehicle propulsion, home heating, or industrial process heat.
Convert to electric cars and trucks, and then you're talking.
>the fact is that the Earth is Dying(tm)
Has Netcraft confirmed it?
Seriously, the worst we could possibly do is Yet Another mass extinction event, and we don't look close to that. The planet ran fine and sustained a lot of life without ice on the poles. The changes coming down the pike are going to hurt us a lot worse than they'll hurt the planet: we're trying to feed six billion humans using climate-sensitive crops.
The reality is that our system is bad at measuring externalities - a fancy economics word that means pollution, destruction, and all the other bad things that happen when you make something - but good at measuring what it does measure.
Why is it inevitable, though?
Well, quite frankly, California and Canada are already implementing carbon taxes. And, quite frankly, Oregon and Washington and at least ten other US states will join in with them.
Why?
Because it's already something you have to measure to do business with most international companies.
But why does this impact us?
Because, once the West and Northeast put it in place, you'll have no choice but to join in, as we represent (just CA, OR, and WA) more than 40 percent of the US economy, and the other states put us at more than 65 percent. Therefore, we'll get the economies of scale and our sheer market power will force you to go along with it.
It's called the market. Capitalism cares nothing for your political views, only what the market tells it to do, in a market economy.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The whole central problem behind the "carbon" tax is that with the lack of consensus over whether or not fossil fuel emissions are increasing the Greenhouse Effect and producing global average temperature rise
Or, the very fact that our oceans will become too acidic (more than 2 pH levels) to support life and dissolve all shells from shellfish and destroy all coral by 2020, might be of even greater concern than just the rise in temperature.
It's actually not the rise itself, but what it means - massive oscillations in temperatures, massive hurricanes as a daily occurrence, that kind of thing - that is the main issue.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
All you leftists whine about how dumb it is to make marijuana illegal and prostitution illegal because it just creates a massive black market.
Well how dumb would you have to be as a citizen to play along with a Carbon Tax? Talk about black market activities... people will start producing their own fuels and modes of transportation that are VERY INEFFICENT yet tax free. The profit will go to these "Carbon Pirates". And the schmuck citizens who play along with the tax will simply be paying more money for no real environmental benefit when the black market is factored in.
Nobody should cut anyone off.
I've never been cut-off by a hybrid, despite seeing a few a day...but I'm constantly being cut-off by SUVs driven in a threatening manner.
Perhaps because there are so many more of the polluting cave-man-technology safety blankets on the roads in the USA?
Blar.
What a scam. What garbage.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Please look at this low cost alternative CO2 Sequestration system.
u ll/442624a.html
h tm
e rra-preta.html
d f
The integrated energy strategy offered by Terra Preta Soil technology may
provide the only path to sustain our agricultural and fossil fueled power
structure without climate degradation, other than nuclear power.
I feel we should push for this Terra Preta Soils CO2 sequestration strategy as not only a global warming remedy for the first world, but to solve fertilization and transport issues for the third world. This information needs to be shared with all the state programs.
The economics look good, and truly great if we had CO2 cap & trade in place. These are processes where you can have your Bio-fuels, Carbon Sequestration and fertility too.
Nature article: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v442/n7103/f
Here's the Cornell page for an over view:
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehm...r_home.
This Earth Science Forum thread on these soil contains further links ( I post everything I find on Amazon Dark Soils, ADS here):
http://forums.hypography.com/earth-science/3451-t
The Georgia Inst. of Technology page:
http://www.energy.gatech.edu/presentations/dday.p
There is an ecology going on in these soils that is not completely understood, and if replicated and applied at scale would have multiple benefits for farmers and environmentalist.
Terra Preta creates a terrestrial carbon reef at a microscopic level. These nanoscale structures provide safe haven to the microbes and fungus that facilitate fertile soil creation, while sequestering carbon for many hundred if not thousands of years. The combination of these two forms of sequestration would also increase the growth rate and natural sequestration effort of growing plants.
Here is a great pyrolysis process , ( http://www.eprida.com/hydro/ ) which could use existing infrastructure to provide Charcoal sustainable Agriculture , Syn-Fuels, and a variation of this process would also work as well for H2 , Charcoal-Fertilizer, while sequestering CO2 from Coal fired plants to build soils at large scales , be sure to read the "See an initial analysis NEW" link of this technology to clean up Coal fired power plants.
If pre Columbian Indians could produce these soils up to 6 feet deep over 20% of the Amazon basin it seems that our energy and agricultural industries could also product them at scale.
Harnessing the work of this vast number of microbes and fungi changes the whole equation of EROEI for food and Bio fuels. I see this as the only sustainable agricultural strategy if we no longer have cheap fossil fuels for fertilizer.
We need this super community of wee beasties to work in concert with us by populating them into their proper Soil horizon Carbon Condos.
Erich J. Knight
The dude was like "Carbon trading is where it's at."
The reporter was like "Isn't that essentially for future carbon shifting.
The Dude was like "Nooo no no no, right now truckers don't have to idle their trucks to stay warm overnight because our program pays for electric hookups for them to use."
And the reporter was like: "You do know that the project has the money but has yet to actually install any of the hookups."
And the DUde was like "Oh, well, I dint know that but it's still a great idea!"
And then I laughed my ass off. Eco-aware soccer moms are neither eco-aware or moms. Discuss.
Obious answer: Yes.
Non-obvious question: How much should the tax be?
To be "fair" it should be about as much as the "real" cost to the public for using that much carbon. The UK study a few weeks ago (sorry; I'm too lazy to look it up right now) was the first I've seen that tried to put a dollar value on how much carbon emissions cost. I did some napkin-back calculations and came up with about $.75/gallon of gas.
(Am I way off here? You could argue the data (and/or my math) a little either way, but I'm thinking that's a reasonable order-of-magnitude estimate.)
I'm thinking that would be an additional 25% cost added to gasoline and simular fuels. I'm thinking this would have a serious short-term ecconomic impact. (Maybe smooth that out by phasing the tax in $0.10 a year over 8 years?)
Another problem is that people are going to be (reasonably) reluctant to throw away their brand-new SUVs as soon as this tax is passed. Nor are they going to abandon their home just because it is fifteen miles away from their workplace. People are making decisions NOW that will have effects for many years. (And, if gas prices jump by $.75, then used SUVs and far-out houses aren't going to sell very well.) (How much energy does it take to make a car, anyway?)
I think other posters have commented that energy taxes are regressive on the theory that poor people can't afford efficient devices (cars, appliances, etc.) In times of shortages, rationing often seems more "fair." But if carbon credits can be traded for money, then they might as well just use money. And if not, then it means that a whole second ecconomy has to be created and regulated.
For example, if a company wants to send someone to another city for a conference, who's carbon credits are used to pay for the jet fuel? The airline gets to choose which plane to fly. The sending company decides to send their employee. Hopefully the employee doesn't have to use personal credits? But the employee is the only natural person in the exchange! Where do the corporations (airline or sender) get their credits? From customers? From investors? Or do you get to manufacture credits just by incorporating?
I think this is problematic from a lot of angles. This is why politicians cook up very complex laws -- to try to cover as many edge and corner cases as they (and their lobyists!) can think of.
I can see a carbon tax happening in other countries, but not the US any time soon. A carbon tax would encourage Americans to start seriously investigating energy alternatives (such as fusion, or fast breeder reactors).
That would topple the US empire. The US empire works because of three things:
1. US banks have a monopoly on creating US dollars through consumers borrowing money into existence.
2. The US military prevents nations with major oil supplies and without nuclear weapons from selling oil in anything other than US dollars.
3. As long as the world runs on oil for transport, and many other things, the rest of the world will be forced to make goods, perform services, or steal (difficult) from holders of US dollars.
Because more US dollars keep flooding into existence, (foreign) holders of US dollars get shafted because the dollar keeps dropping in value. This is how the rest of the world gets taxed, through inflation.
Russia is in a somewhat similar boat. It too has largish oil reserves and so doesn't want to lose the power that comes with that.
And that's why the US and Russia, despite having the muscle to do it, are putting forth such measly amounts into the ITER (1/11th each from memory). And the EU, and Japan are putting in such large efforts - because they don't have any oil reserves. Let's face it, if fusion gets off the ground, anyone with access to water to harvest deuterium can start converting mass into energy. And America would have to start making goods for itself again, instead of living large off the rest of the world.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
By far the biggest hurdle to a carbon tax is convincing our tax-adverse populace to comply with a new tax. Just mentioning taxes is a show-stopper for most politicians. However, there is one phrase that is more evil to Joe 6-pak than "taxes", and that phrase is "income taxes". So, how about a revenue-neutral approach. Lower/eliminate the bottom of the income tax brackets while adding/raising taxes on carbon-based energy. Consumers pay less income taxes, but more at the pump. Joe 6-pak is happy because he gets a bigger paycheck. He pays more to gas up his 4-wheel drive extended supercab, but he blames the Arabs for that problem. He also knows that he can buy a Prius if he gets really tired of paying so much for fuel (although for cultural reasons, he will no longer be able to take his friends to NASCAR events).
Obviously, just about every product and service will increase in price because underlying energy costs will increase production costs. This will put market pressures on all industries to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels so they can gain competitive advantage. Meanwhile, smart consumers will be able to lower their overall tax bill while those of us who don't want to adapt will pay more taxes than we currently pay.
The increased costs of goods/services will be a drag on our economy, but that drag is coming sooner or later. It's just a sad fact of being so dependent upon a finite resource. I would rather pay a little more now and avoid the increasingly volatile energy fluctuations that will most certainly occur as fossil fuel supplies dwindle. Hopefully, the drag on the economy will be somewhat countered by increased spending for more efficient products as well as the growth of the alternate energy industry. To minimize the impact on the economy, the transition from income taxes to carbon taxes would have to be reasonably slow, maybe a 3% shift per year. Ten years from now, the average citizen would pay 30% less income taxes and 30% more carbon taxes.
Oil is dirt cheap, no matter how much Americans complain about gas prices. The fact is, that there's a lot of oil, and it doesn't cost much.
So, consider a single government - what can it do? Fossil carbon and particularly oil is used so widely in all sorts of economic activity, (transportation, manufacture, etc.) that taxing oil increases the price of all goods from the nation. A single country would shoot itself in the foot by taxing carbon. Only if all governments agree to tax oil, then it works. That isn't going to happen. In effect, we're well past the point of no return: it's easier to consume all oil than limits its use.
Yet, the carbon tax issue isn't that simple. You have to think about what a tax is: a transfer payment in a zero-sum game. Those who consume oil pay the tax for the government - which consumes the same oil itself. The government employees have to drive to work, too. Effectively, a carbon tax has no net effects for environmental protection.
Another model is to tax oil and then pay corporate welfare to oil companies. Results aren't any different.
Also, the population is growing at the same pace as energy efficiency is gained. The only way the carbon tax would work is that entire countries would decline the use of oil, even if it's cheap. The political stability of domestically produced energy is gaining importance, but it still doesn't present any alternative to the massive use of oil and coal.
"Well, we're just about to slide past the moon and there's only one country that can change our course.
China."
Seeing as the US is the country polluting (highest CO2 emission both total and per capita) the most, why would you look to China?
I totally agree with you, but your sig prompted me to think: What are some of those dangerous ideas, that sound good but actually aren't? I couldn't think of any offhand.
Subsidies for ethanol and hydrogen fuels and research are a great example of terrible ideas that probably emanate from the well-intentioned. Neither exist as a natural resource, and thus they must be man-made.
Ethanol is an environmental disaster that is only just barely energy positive, even under the most optimistic evalution. This means that in many cases, creating the alcohol requires more energy than you get out of it. There's much talk of using crops other than corn, with the spotlight on Brazil and its sugar cane, which produces ethanol that is probably solidly energy-positive. Unfortunately, that won't scale to the meet the demand in the hugely-wasteful US, even if the US had the year-round growing season that benefits Brazil.
Hydrogen is in a similar situation -- making it requires either huge amounts of electricity, or huge amounts of natural gas, both of which are more-efficiently used in other ways.
The goal of the carbon tax is to reduce C02 creation, not to raise revenue. So don't make it do the latter. Collect the tax as specified (based on amount of C02 created), but then every year, every U.S. citizen gets a check -- 1/300,000,000 of the taxes collected. After all, we're the ones getting damaged by its creation!
Why is this good? First, it reduces the "it's just a tax increase in disguise" critics (who otherwise have a point.) This also lessens the argument about how much the tax should be, since most of it's "coming back" -- it's not the gov't trying to sneak in a tax increase. Second, think how fond many people are of their tax refund check, and here's a new (and guaranteed) one! (Sadly, casinos and the lottery office will do quite well on the day the checks arrive.) Third, if you do create carbon, you're paying for it, so it's no longer a class warfare/guilt trip issue, at least as far as CO2 is concerned.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Spoiler Warning: If you haven't read Crichton's State of Fear and prefer not to have things spoiled for you, don't read further. I don't know whether what follows constitutes spoiling information, but I hate it when people spoil books for me, so I wanted to note in advance that I'm talking below about the book as if you've read it.
I've heard this claim, too, and it prompts me to ask a question that's been nagging at me for some time in hopes someone here at Slashdot can shed some light:
Can anyone explain why Michael Crichton's State of Fear so strongly seems to take the opposite position? He's a scientist by training, and not a stupid guy. Most of his works reflect a very good understanding of technology and a decent appreciation for how technology interplays with society. That doesn't make him infallible or anything, but it does cause me to want to understand how to put his story into perspective.
Is he one of those who were paid off? Was he approached by someone selling hype in the form of a good story and then so intrigued by the issues that he forgot to check whether the citations he was given were legit? How did he reach a conclusion no one else did? Is he just an idiot? Has he sold out ethics for a provocative book?
He certainly sounded like he genuinely cared about the idea of saving the world from what it seems clear he perceives as environmental whackos just making stuff up. He seems to take a lot of time to research things, and I assume he's neither hurting for money nor incapable of writing a best-selling book with the opposite position if that's where the data led. I listened on audiobook, which made it hard to go back and do reference checking, but it sounds heavily footnoted when he makes his claims, and I presume someone has tracked some of those. Maybe they'll share their results here.
It leads me to wonder if he is missing something... or if I am. How does one sort this out?
And a side note (just to keep this on topic of the Carbon Tax): Even in the case Crichton is right and everyone else is wrong and there's no issue at present, I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea to "practice" responding to a crisis. Until population growth and resource use is under control, we're either already in crisis or on the path to having a real crisis. And when that happens, we'll need to understand what sociological mechanisms are productive for pulling things into control because we'll need to resolve things quickly. (Experience with the World Trade Center says people will throw rights and justice out the window and just ask to be safe if push comes to shove--look at what happened with the Patriot Act. I'd like to avoid kneejerk moves toward protective dictatorships down the line by doing something a little less harsh now, and a Carbon Tax, whatever you think of it, is certainly more moderate than other extreme measures that could come later if carbon issues got more severe.) Just as the original Internet worm alerted people to the issue of virus control in a way that probably avoided a later surprise attack by something more harmful on the "first try", one could argue that even the expense of a "practice" run on this was worth the time. If Crichton is right. And if he's wrong, it's all the more urgent.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
You make some good points, I like Crichton, and I'm not inclined to believe he's been "bought out". (For one thing, I doubt it'd be worth "buying" him since he earns enough money from his books that he'd be much more likely to value his good name.)
I haven't read State of Fear yet, but I've heard it cited enough by those who think it proves their point that what you told me is no "spoiler". :)
If I had to guess as to why Crichton is a little paranoid in this regard it would have to be that he's never actually had to apply for a grant (I've been involved in several and have one due tomorrow where I'm the PI), so he has no idea how ludicrous his "conspiracy" actually is. Also, of course, as a writer, inventing conspiracies is what he has experience at.
Now I guess I have to actually read that book so I can form a more educated opinion about Crichton.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?