From what I can tell, this is a political maneuvering by the oil industry to not be nailed to the cross like the tobacco industry did: knowingly selling a highly toxic product that is conclusively linked to many disorders including cancer, and covering it up or minimizing it in the media for decades to continue profiting.
Unfortunately, it's not going to work, and they will be ran out of business through the political will of the people, just as the tobacco industry is now having done to it.
You're not cool if you smoke, and you're not cool if you don't drive a Tesla. It isn't often that the right thing is also the cool thing; everyone involved should pat themselves on the back for a job well done.
I think part of the coolness of driving a Telsa comes from the cars being a symbol of wealth, although maybe the Model 3 will be a little different in this regard.
Unfortunately, it's not going to work, and they will be ran out of business through the political will of the people, just as the tobacco industry is now having done to it.
Cool, and what's your proposal for an alternative energy source to power modern civilisation?
1. If fossil fuel use is reduced to cars/trucks, the problem is largely solved. In the US, only 26% of emissions come from transportation.[1]
2. Electric cars will make this irrelevant, since they'll draw their power from the grid. In the meantime, ICEs/hybrids are becoming increasingly efficient.
Nuclear would solve a lot of problem if we are able to overcome power transmission issue. Not everyone wants a nuclear power plant anywhere near them. But oil would still be used for plastics, transportation (airplanes, tankers), heating, etc...
"Cool, and what's your proposal for an alternative energy source to power modern civilisation?"
We have several alternatives.
The only problem they have is that most of them are difficult to store in a self-contained moving vehicle that turns rubber wheels to move on flat blacktop.
So, we increase reliance on vehicles that turn steel wheels on steel tracks, and get their power from overhead wires.
Most of the electrical energy comes from burning things that create carbon-dioxide as a side product. The only real alternative is fission, and the public opinion against nuclear is even worse than against oil. How do you solve this problem?
Getting people and things moved by train is a great idea, but in the grand scheme of things we're dependant on oil for so many other things.
Well over 40% of US electricity comes from things that don't create carbon dioxide. Exact numbers are hard to come by because a lot of solar power for example never ends up on the electric grid.
I know this is very hard for this forum to consider at times, but the world is not only the US, and the question about what do with coal, oil, and gas is a global, not a US problem. United States is a somewhat lucky outlier when it comes to energy production. Unfortunately, even in other currently lucky nations, the public sentiment is strongly against nuclear power.
In 2013 91.6% of the energy cames from CO2 producing sources[1], and nuclear production is decreasing[1], having peaked in 2005.
The exact percentage, whether it's 91.5% or under 60% doesn't even matter though, what matters is that fossil fuel burning is increasing in absolute terms[1].
Easily, 99.9% of all energy used by humans comes from sunlight just looking at farms. Plants store a tiny percentage the ~200+watts per meter of sunlight* average over 24 hours, but if you needed to grow them indoors it would take ridiculous amounts of energy.
* You can approximate that from 4 pi R ^2 as surface area of a sphere / pi * r^2 surface area of a circle. So ~25% of 1050 W/m2 of direct sunlight on the surface. We don't farm above the arctic circle for example so that's just an approximation and most places have winters etc.
So, really it's just a question of how and what we are counting.
PS: ~200w average * 10,000 * 134,000,000 = 2,300,000 terrawatt hours. Oil and coal combined provide less than 40 terrawatt hours per year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#/medi... You can play with the numbers but we also depend on plankton to feed fish and of course enough sunlight to keep the earth from freezing.
If we are concerned about reducing CO2 emissions, energy usage is the important metric, not electricity.
However, this distinction doesn't matter much here, because, as I said:
> The exact percentage, whether it's 91.5% or under 60% doesn't even matter though, what matters is that fossil fuel burning is increasing in absolute terms[1].
Also, we burn fossil fuels to heat up houses. If we want to burn less fossil fuels for that, we need to generate more electricity, but we need to do it without fossil fuels. The only available ecological technology that exists today and has enough capacity is nuclear, and nuclear production is decreasing.
We burn a lot of fossil fuels. A big part for electricity, some other part to do other things (X). A big part (not all) of X can be done electrically too, but then we need a way to generate that extra electricity without fossil fuels.
Just re-stating the problem. People use fossil fuels to heat homes, but we don't generally consider passive heat gain.
China has a lot of fossil fuel use if you look at fossil fuels, but they are also a world leader in solar hot water heaters. They don't show up on most statistics, but people still enjoy the hot water. Further they cost less than 1/10th of what similar systems cost in the US and could dramatically reduce the need for home heating.
And I propose the e-bicycle conversion kits, generally for the price of a commuter class cheap bike the cost per watt of motor and cost per KWh lithium battery has been dropping by half every couple years. Today in 2016 you're looking at about two watts of motor power per dollar (so $500 kit would get you more than a horsepower, and riding on horseback seems adequately fast) and about $30 per mile of battery range so $500 of lithium ion should get me around 15 miles on a charge (depends a lot on speed, hills, how much you pedal, etc)
Of course the government is getting in the way with all kinds of regulation and outright banning in some more backwards cities (NYC, etc). But I don't live in a backwards city so no problemo.
Until 2016 I'm not going to ride a bike to work because I'll be all sweaty during the roughly two months per year the weather is good enough to ride a bike. However my son is very interested in the mechanical work of assembling an ebike conversion, and it sounds like a fun teen boy and dad project to work on together, so in 2017 I could slowly ride an ebike to work mostly sweatless. Its an interesting technological development. I have not gone beyond a couple hours of online research on this project, but I'm figuring for a couple grand, which isn't much, we can build matching ebikes.
> However my son is very interested in the mechanical work of assembling an ebike conversion, and it sounds like a fun teen boy and dad project to work on together
Sounds cool! Let me suggest (if you haven't thought about this already) to document all steps and publish it on a blog or something. Other interested dads, curious kids and DIYs in general will love it and might give a shot.
I actually don't have one, though, but that's only because everything I do on a regular basis is within 2 miles. My ride to work on a normal pedal bike is 6 minutes.
I agree that cities are absurd for banning small 2 wheeled vehicles with little momentum while permitting large 4 wheeled vehicles with massive momentum (and with it, massive ability to mangle and destroy human bodies).
> You're not cool if you smoke, and you're not cool if you don't drive a Tesla.
PM has been trading for more in the last 5 months than it has in the last 8 years.
Cool to who? Tesla ownership is a sign that you have money to spend but are not informed enough to purchase a vehicle that's worth the money. You might be cool in tech circles, but people that know cars will roll their eyes.
Car guy here: None of my car guy friends "roll there eyes" at Teslas. Myself and my "car guy" friends are all Porsche guys who all work on their own air cooled cars - we rebuild our own motors and transmissions, corner balance our cars for the track, etc. Then again, we probably aren't cool though. ;-)
Have any of your car guy friends driven a Tesla? They're some of the worst-handling cars on the market today. Quick 0-60 times land them in lots of headlines, but the second you have to turn the car, it's really frustrating.
My car friends fall into two camps: those who have never driven a Tesla, and those who have. The former group is optimistic and looks upon Tesla products with naked desire; the latter group has already dismissed the entire company as The Sharper Image of car sales.
I haven't found a Tesla to have bad handling. I'm not a handling expert, but during a test drive, it met my needs for handling. I'd buy a Tesla for the zero emissions and driver assistance features. The handling as-is is sufficient for me. (I don't recall any of the major automotive publications mentioning bad handling in their reviews. Do you have links to the C&D, R&T or Motor Trend reviews that mention this issue?)
Very rarely do mainstream auto reviewers talk about this sort of thing. A couple of exceptions are in the case of a car that is damn near dangerous to drive, or a car that is expected to handle properly and fails to excel.
Since the Tesla is a car that competes with luxury cars rather than sports cars, it falls into neither of these categories. A reviewer calling it out for poor handling will thus generate a ton of ill-will and angry comments sections from the 'who-cares' crowd, so they don't bother with it.
Here's an example of what passes for an excoriation from mainstream auto media:
The phrasing here, combined with a lead-photo of abysmal body roll, indicates to car people that this thing handles like a boat. I've verified this myself behind the wheel.
I understand and agree that this car handles just fine for the mass majority of people, but "meets needs" is kind of a shitty bar to set for a car priced to compete with the BMW M4.
I have driven one (two?) and was very impressed with it's straight line acceleration. I didn't press the handling at all (the owner wasn't the kind of guy who would/could appreciate that) so you may have a good point.
I feel it's important to note that the entire world of "not car guys" spends pretty much every interaction with "car guys" rolling their eyes about everything. Generally speaking, people just don't care about being cool for the sake of subcultures.
People who compare oil and tobacco ignore the benefits side. For tobacco, the positive benefits are very small. The oil industry on the other hand powers our entire modern way of life.
* Ever fly in an airplane - thank oil
* Ever ride in a car or bus - thank oil
* Live in a cold climate and heat your home in winter - thank oil
* Ever use plastics - thank oil
* Ever buy something on Amazon and had it shipped to you - thank oil
* Ever buy something manufactured in another country - thank oil
* Ever use electricity on a still night - you should probably thank natural gas or coal
* Ever mail a letter - thank oil
If tobacco and tobacco products were suddenly unavailable tomorrow morning - the world would probably be a better place
If oil and oil products were suddenly unavailable tomorrow morning - it would probably result in the collapse of civilization as we know it and millions of deaths
Let's not pretend oil and tobacco have anywhere near the same pro/con trade offs.
Oil is in everything. Transportation of course, but it's in our clothes, our houses, computers, our food (fertilizer for example), etc. It's very difficult to point to something that oil ISN'T in (here in the US). I'm sure I'll get responses which do.
>People who compare oil and tobacco ignore the benefits
That's wrong. This article compares the two because it seems both groups committed fraud via funding misinformation campaigns that had a goal of affecting legislation on regulation.
Extremists are the ones who cannot deal with the obvious negatives of oil along with the benefits.
We cannot rely on Exxon to lobby for carbon tax legislation that will represent the average person. Please take 2 minutes to learn about the carbon tax and call your representatives. "Hey my name is [your name] and I want the Representative to support the "Climate Protection and Justice Act"
I wasn't sure if carbontax.org was a good site, but then saw a number of the founders worked for Move NY, and upon googling them, I found that they are fighting for congestion pricing in NY. Which signals to me that they get it.
Exxon is probably pushing this because it will help their business.
The #1 "victim" of a carbon tax is coal, which accounts for about 30% of our energy production. A carbon tax will redistribute this production to other sources, mainly natural gas (which emits 42% less carbon). Exxon does a lot of natural gas extraction, and virtually nothing with coal.
Exxon is also working on carbon sequestration technology.
Which becomes a much more profitable business if there is a real carbon tax.
And as far as oil goes - a carbon tax has comparatively little effect on gas prices. $30/ton would be about 27 cents per gallon [1].
EDIT - After RT-entire-FA, I see they got to this point. But I think they are overcomplicating things with points #1,2,4,5. It's just good business for Exxon.
No it isn't. US gas prices are comically low compared to virtually every other country on the planet. The exceptions are countries with stupidly low gas prices like Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. If this tax was applied it wouldn't push America into European levels of pricing. It wouldn't even nudge it into Canadian pricing levels.
I'm fine with Exxon benefitting from a carbon tax. They have the political clout to push a bill like this through Congress, and it benefits the country as a whole to have carbon legislation in place. Seems like a win-win to me.
I think that it's a bad thing that "multi-national corporation" has become synonymous with "bad agent" or even "evil." Much of our society is multi-national corporations, so when we have a biased view of them we may end up cutting off our nose to spite our face.
And in popular culture, if we end up with people opposed to a carbon tax just because Exxon wants a carbon tax too, well it doesn't more nose-less than that.
Society doesn't have aims, people do. Your unstated assumption that you views represent everyone else's is incorrect, and I am sure that my aims are very different from yours.
I think the intended point was that, in a capitalist society, the instutions of capital (i.e. multi-national corporations) do not act with the best interests of the average person, but rather the interests of the institutions themselves and their biggest benefactors: the executives and shareholders.
I don't know if you consider the existing society capitalist or not, but I can't give serious consideration to the idea that corporations even vaguely represent the aims of society. Yes, you can claim that people have aims, not societies, but people constitute societies, and the aims of 99.9% of people are not aligned with the aims of the corporations.
Having corporations in a capitalist society clearly correlates with things like reduced infant mortality, better health, etc. They do this by creating value that people want to buy and providing jobs that people want to have. Sounds representative of the aims of society to me.
"Much of our society is multi-national corporations"
I have problems with that statement.
In my opinion, if we start forgetting we are a society of humans that, sometimes, use corporations as a tool for collaborating, we have serious problems.
So, everybody, repeat with me: we want to maximize humans welfare. Corporations are tools.
That's exactly what I meant by that statement, corporations are tools for our collaboration. They are a dominant form of our economic collaboration. Nearly all of us invest in them in our retirement savings. Many of us work for them. Everyone uses their services. So they have a big role in our society, and they are a tool that can be used in good and bad ways.
So in summary, I'm not sure what your problem was with that statement, other than perhaps my statement was too ambiguous :)
My problem was not with your comment specifically, but with a narrative trend I have observed where corporations, or also the economy, are the 'raison d'être' and we are the accessory.
It's something subtle in the public discourse (or not so subtle sometimes).
There are typically competing multi-nationals that have market share to gain by diminishing their competitors, so you can assume that there will be lobbies on both sides for legislation that interferes with the free market.
There is no "free market here"--CO2 production is an externalized cost and not taxing it enables some companies (that use energy) to pass off part of the costs of their profit-making activities on everyone else.
My understanding is that externalized costs have nothing to do with a free market. Intervention is necessary in order to account for the externalized costs, which is an infringement on a free market. Are you saying that is incorrect?
Free markets are not the same as the state of nature. A basic assumption is that if you want a benefit from someone, or you want someone to shoulder a burden in a way that benefits you, have you to transact with that person.
Say you run a delivery business, and your bike messengers can save a lot of time (netting you a higher profit) cutting across your neighbor's property. It's a free market when you can freely transact with your neighbor for an easement over his property; it's not a free market when the government fails to stop you from trespassing on his property without his permission.
Externalized costs from pollution aren't any different. Like trespassing, pollution burdens other peoples' property. Letting people pollute unchecked undermines the free market.
This argument is a good way of understanding that there is no such thing as a free market. The air we breathe is treated differently to the land we walk on, under the laws we have adopted in most of society. Land is bought and sold, while air is in "the commons" and free to use for everyone, including big industry. Land was once also in the commons, before the process of Enclosure when capitalism really took off. Once it became clear that land was a necessary component in the capitalist mode of production, the government was called upon to legislate for the privatisation of all land. This was beneficial to the rich in two ingenious ways. It provided the means for the private ownership of land, from which to profit by renting it out to farmers etc. In addition, those who could not produce enough from the land to make rent were forced to move into cities and take up work in factories at pitiful wages.
Remember how this came about though, the government of the time had to "step in" and end the use of land as a commons and bring about its privatisation. This sounds like market intervention, doesn't it? We don't look at it that way though, as it was the government intervention that kicked off the whole machine of capitalism. The wealthy at the time were mostly in favour of it and so it had a lot of support.
So what is a free market? In order to have a market at all, you need a government which defends the property "rights" (a purely ideological/philosophical assertion by Locke and co.) of private owners of the stuff and things that we use to produce in this world. We use air to produce things too, as well as land. Just as land must be used to accept the refuse of our production and consumption (rubbish dumps, landfills), the air does too. We charge people to put stuff in landfills, so why don't we charge people to put stuff in the air? This carbon tax is effectively a way of "uncommonsing" the air, just as the land was in the 18th century. This proposed intervention is less popular among the wealthy, of course, as it is not a form of privatisation that they can easily profit from. Ultimately, if it comes to it, they will surely be passing the cost of this privatisation to the workers and consumers in the end anyway.
I don't have data, but I wouldn't be surprised if support for a carbon tax rises with income. I don't care if the cost of gas goes up by 50 cents a gallon, but I bet I would if I only made 25k a year and had an hour long driving commute every day.
That's pretty lazy reasoning. Tech companies spend a lot of time promoting STEM education. They benefit from the government teaching people those skills on the public dime. So do you reflexively question the benefit society gets from STEM education?
Corporations are infinitely selfish and completely merciless, not evil. They're as likely to do good for good's sake as they are to do evil for evil's sake.
Ok, I did my due diligence and read my comment over at least three times, I fail to see where I said corporations are "evil". Were you agreeing with me? Because other than the evil part, your comment is much in line with what I meant.
I have deeply negative feelings about Exxon for misleading the public on the dangers of fossil fuel combustion while having ample knowledge of that danger (they've known for 40 years). However, I'm a pragmatist; it's more important that we take steps which will move us off carbon-generating energy sources than it is to render punishment. If Exxon happens to benefit, fine. I'd be more pleased if their executives were convicted on criminal charges and the tax was implemented due to the overwhelming will of American voters, but this is fine too.
It's nowhere near enough to meaningfully affect demand. The EIA estimates[1] that gasoline has to get 25-50% more expensive to reduce demand by even 1%.
The article linked to an Economist article on British Columbia's $30/ton carbon tax, where it seemed to have a much more significant effect:
>BC’s fuel consumption is also down. Over the past six years, the per-person consumption of fuels has dropped by 16% (although declines levelled off after the last tax increase in 2012). During that same period, per-person consumption in the rest of Canada rose by 3%. “Each year the evidence becomes stronger and stronger that the carbon tax is driving environmental gains,” says Stewart Elgie, an economics professor at University of Ottawa and head of Sustainable Prosperity, a pro-green think-tank. At the same time, BC’s economy has kept pace with the rest of the country.
I'm not sure I trust future projections much from the EIA; they are extremely conservative in terms of being unable to imagine non-fossil fuel energy. They've been consistently wrong on renewable technology as well:
I don't mean to diminish the excellent work they do. But for projections like this they must necessarily embody lots of opinion, and there's a good chance that their opinions embody the slow-change mindset of the energy industry.
This is comparing miles traveled to fuel costs when it really should compare fuel consumed / person to fuel costs since MPG is not static.
I would bet with hybrid (and arguably electric) cars being as usable as their ICE cousins that the demand for transportation fuel will become far more elastic.
Everyone knows we need a direct carbon tax, it's just too convenient politically to be anti-tax. As a result, I think this is mostly a marketing problem.
From the article, it looks like the current bill is "Climate Protection and Justice Act of 2015". I propose instead the "Save our Children Act". Hard to be against that.
Rural communities spend more carbon than city communities. Basically they drive farther. Also less people live in apartment buildings which are more efficient to cool/heat because of shared walls.
Exactly James. I don't live in a rural area, but I did grow up in a small town. You have to drive everywhere. Most people live in houses. I have a problem in general with taxing for change. It always benefits the large corporations and crushes the small businesses. Besides that, the three letter agencies have a horrible track record of catering to corrupt companies.
I feel like a lot of the people who are against carbon taxes have little to no empathy for those who live in areas of the globe most likely to become less hospitable to life in a few decades.
And that's a lot more people who tend to be much poorer than even the poor rural Americans.
People in rural communities typically earn less and consume more petroleum based products. They don't have public transportation. A carbon tax will only further widen the gap between the rich and the poor.
People in rural communities typically earn less and consume more petroleum based products.
The argument goes, this is exactly why a carbon tax is needed. The externalities of using fossil fuels aren't captured in the price, leading to overconsumption. There are plenty of ways to mitigate impact, either by applying a graduated subsidy to low-income populations, etc. Allowing folks to continue to live in a financially unsustainable way doesn't seem to be the answer...
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadUnfortunately, it's not going to work, and they will be ran out of business through the political will of the people, just as the tobacco industry is now having done to it.
You're not cool if you smoke, and you're not cool if you don't drive a Tesla. It isn't often that the right thing is also the cool thing; everyone involved should pat themselves on the back for a job well done.
https://www.scribd.com/document/320110894/Alex-Epstein-Moral...
Funny that the people who get labeled "climate deniers" are also the most pro-nuclear, while the loud environmentalists are the most anti-nuclear.
I frankly don't give a damn what they believe or don't believe, if they're going to solve the problem anyway.
2. Electric cars will make this irrelevant, since they'll draw their power from the grid. In the meantime, ICEs/hybrids are becoming increasingly efficient.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
We have several alternatives.
The only problem they have is that most of them are difficult to store in a self-contained moving vehicle that turns rubber wheels to move on flat blacktop.
So, we increase reliance on vehicles that turn steel wheels on steel tracks, and get their power from overhead wires.
Next question?
Getting people and things moved by train is a great idea, but in the grand scheme of things we're dependant on oil for so many other things.
In 2013 91.6% of the energy cames from CO2 producing sources[1], and nuclear production is decreasing[1], having peaked in 2005.
The exact percentage, whether it's 91.5% or under 60% doesn't even matter though, what matters is that fossil fuel burning is increasing in absolute terms[1].
[1] http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication...
Easily, 99.9% of all energy used by humans comes from sunlight just looking at farms. Plants store a tiny percentage the ~200+watts per meter of sunlight* average over 24 hours, but if you needed to grow them indoors it would take ridiculous amounts of energy.
* You can approximate that from 4 pi R ^2 as surface area of a sphere / pi * r^2 surface area of a circle. So ~25% of 1050 W/m2 of direct sunlight on the surface. We don't farm above the arctic circle for example so that's just an approximation and most places have winters etc.
So, really it's just a question of how and what we are counting.
PS: ~200w average * 10,000 * 134,000,000 = 2,300,000 terrawatt hours. Oil and coal combined provide less than 40 terrawatt hours per year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#/medi... You can play with the numbers but we also depend on plankton to feed fish and of course enough sunlight to keep the earth from freezing.
If we are concerned about reducing CO2 emissions, energy usage is the important metric, not electricity.
However, this distinction doesn't matter much here, because, as I said:
> The exact percentage, whether it's 91.5% or under 60% doesn't even matter though, what matters is that fossil fuel burning is increasing in absolute terms[1].
Also, we burn fossil fuels to heat up houses. If we want to burn less fossil fuels for that, we need to generate more electricity, but we need to do it without fossil fuels. The only available ecological technology that exists today and has enough capacity is nuclear, and nuclear production is decreasing.
We burn a lot of fossil fuels. A big part for electricity, some other part to do other things (X). A big part (not all) of X can be done electrically too, but then we need a way to generate that extra electricity without fossil fuels.
> [something about plants and fish]
True, but I don't understand the relevance.
Just re-stating the problem. People use fossil fuels to heat homes, but we don't generally consider passive heat gain.
China has a lot of fossil fuel use if you look at fossil fuels, but they are also a world leader in solar hot water heaters. They don't show up on most statistics, but people still enjoy the hot water. Further they cost less than 1/10th of what similar systems cost in the US and could dramatically reduce the need for home heating.
Woe to the bicycle commuter, I suppose.
Also, I think you forget there are huge chunks of the world where this is utterly untrue.
And I propose the e-bicycle conversion kits, generally for the price of a commuter class cheap bike the cost per watt of motor and cost per KWh lithium battery has been dropping by half every couple years. Today in 2016 you're looking at about two watts of motor power per dollar (so $500 kit would get you more than a horsepower, and riding on horseback seems adequately fast) and about $30 per mile of battery range so $500 of lithium ion should get me around 15 miles on a charge (depends a lot on speed, hills, how much you pedal, etc)
Of course the government is getting in the way with all kinds of regulation and outright banning in some more backwards cities (NYC, etc). But I don't live in a backwards city so no problemo.
Until 2016 I'm not going to ride a bike to work because I'll be all sweaty during the roughly two months per year the weather is good enough to ride a bike. However my son is very interested in the mechanical work of assembling an ebike conversion, and it sounds like a fun teen boy and dad project to work on together, so in 2017 I could slowly ride an ebike to work mostly sweatless. Its an interesting technological development. I have not gone beyond a couple hours of online research on this project, but I'm figuring for a couple grand, which isn't much, we can build matching ebikes.
Sounds cool! Let me suggest (if you haven't thought about this already) to document all steps and publish it on a blog or something. Other interested dads, curious kids and DIYs in general will love it and might give a shot.
I actually don't have one, though, but that's only because everything I do on a regular basis is within 2 miles. My ride to work on a normal pedal bike is 6 minutes.
I agree that cities are absurd for banning small 2 wheeled vehicles with little momentum while permitting large 4 wheeled vehicles with massive momentum (and with it, massive ability to mangle and destroy human bodies).
PM has been trading for more in the last 5 months than it has in the last 8 years.
Cool to who? Tesla ownership is a sign that you have money to spend but are not informed enough to purchase a vehicle that's worth the money. You might be cool in tech circles, but people that know cars will roll their eyes.
My car friends fall into two camps: those who have never driven a Tesla, and those who have. The former group is optimistic and looks upon Tesla products with naked desire; the latter group has already dismissed the entire company as The Sharper Image of car sales.
Since the Tesla is a car that competes with luxury cars rather than sports cars, it falls into neither of these categories. A reviewer calling it out for poor handling will thus generate a ton of ill-will and angry comments sections from the 'who-cares' crowd, so they don't bother with it.
Here's an example of what passes for an excoriation from mainstream auto media:
http://www.autocar.co.uk/car-review/tesla/model-s/ride
The phrasing here, combined with a lead-photo of abysmal body roll, indicates to car people that this thing handles like a boat. I've verified this myself behind the wheel.
I understand and agree that this car handles just fine for the mass majority of people, but "meets needs" is kind of a shitty bar to set for a car priced to compete with the BMW M4.
* Ever fly in an airplane - thank oil
* Ever ride in a car or bus - thank oil
* Live in a cold climate and heat your home in winter - thank oil
* Ever use plastics - thank oil
* Ever buy something on Amazon and had it shipped to you - thank oil
* Ever buy something manufactured in another country - thank oil
* Ever use electricity on a still night - you should probably thank natural gas or coal
* Ever mail a letter - thank oil
If tobacco and tobacco products were suddenly unavailable tomorrow morning - the world would probably be a better place
If oil and oil products were suddenly unavailable tomorrow morning - it would probably result in the collapse of civilization as we know it and millions of deaths
Let's not pretend oil and tobacco have anywhere near the same pro/con trade offs.
NPR Planet Money recently did a series of podcasts about oil - it was pretty good. #4 was the episode where they talked a bit about what oil goes into: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/19/490408060/oil-4...
That's wrong. This article compares the two because it seems both groups committed fraud via funding misinformation campaigns that had a goal of affecting legislation on regulation.
Extremists are the ones who cannot deal with the obvious negatives of oil along with the benefits.
Transport for the 1%! I'll just carry on with my bus. Some of them are already hybrid.
Find your reps: http://tryvoices.com/ Learn more: http://www.carbontax.org/
[1] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/114/s2399
[2] http://www.finance.senate.gov/about/membership
The #1 "victim" of a carbon tax is coal, which accounts for about 30% of our energy production. A carbon tax will redistribute this production to other sources, mainly natural gas (which emits 42% less carbon). Exxon does a lot of natural gas extraction, and virtually nothing with coal.
Exxon is also working on carbon sequestration technology. Which becomes a much more profitable business if there is a real carbon tax.
And as far as oil goes - a carbon tax has comparatively little effect on gas prices. $30/ton would be about 27 cents per gallon [1].
[1] https://www.uscleanenergyfund.com/articles/carbon-tax-simula... (disclaimer - I made this)
EDIT - After RT-entire-FA, I see they got to this point. But I think they are overcomplicating things with points #1,2,4,5. It's just good business for Exxon.
Of course, over here in the UK it's £1.10/liter, which is about $6.
Not to say that society would not benefit, but it does make me wonder.
And in popular culture, if we end up with people opposed to a carbon tax just because Exxon wants a carbon tax too, well it doesn't more nose-less than that.
Until the aims of multinational corporations are aligned with the aims of society at large, they will continue to be considered untrustworthy.
I don't know if you consider the existing society capitalist or not, but I can't give serious consideration to the idea that corporations even vaguely represent the aims of society. Yes, you can claim that people have aims, not societies, but people constitute societies, and the aims of 99.9% of people are not aligned with the aims of the corporations.
I have problems with that statement.
In my opinion, if we start forgetting we are a society of humans that, sometimes, use corporations as a tool for collaborating, we have serious problems.
So, everybody, repeat with me: we want to maximize humans welfare. Corporations are tools.
So in summary, I'm not sure what your problem was with that statement, other than perhaps my statement was too ambiguous :)
It's something subtle in the public discourse (or not so subtle sometimes).
Say you run a delivery business, and your bike messengers can save a lot of time (netting you a higher profit) cutting across your neighbor's property. It's a free market when you can freely transact with your neighbor for an easement over his property; it's not a free market when the government fails to stop you from trespassing on his property without his permission.
Externalized costs from pollution aren't any different. Like trespassing, pollution burdens other peoples' property. Letting people pollute unchecked undermines the free market.
Remember how this came about though, the government of the time had to "step in" and end the use of land as a commons and bring about its privatisation. This sounds like market intervention, doesn't it? We don't look at it that way though, as it was the government intervention that kicked off the whole machine of capitalism. The wealthy at the time were mostly in favour of it and so it had a lot of support.
So what is a free market? In order to have a market at all, you need a government which defends the property "rights" (a purely ideological/philosophical assertion by Locke and co.) of private owners of the stuff and things that we use to produce in this world. We use air to produce things too, as well as land. Just as land must be used to accept the refuse of our production and consumption (rubbish dumps, landfills), the air does too. We charge people to put stuff in landfills, so why don't we charge people to put stuff in the air? This carbon tax is effectively a way of "uncommonsing" the air, just as the land was in the 18th century. This proposed intervention is less popular among the wealthy, of course, as it is not a form of privatisation that they can easily profit from. Ultimately, if it comes to it, they will surely be passing the cost of this privatisation to the workers and consumers in the end anyway.
Um, no. I believe there's a fallacy in there somewhere but I'm not up to speed on them.
I have deeply negative feelings about Exxon for misleading the public on the dangers of fossil fuel combustion while having ample knowledge of that danger (they've known for 40 years). However, I'm a pragmatist; it's more important that we take steps which will move us off carbon-generating energy sources than it is to render punishment. If Exxon happens to benefit, fine. I'd be more pleased if their executives were convicted on criminal charges and the tax was implemented due to the overwhelming will of American voters, but this is fine too.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=19191
>BC’s fuel consumption is also down. Over the past six years, the per-person consumption of fuels has dropped by 16% (although declines levelled off after the last tax increase in 2012). During that same period, per-person consumption in the rest of Canada rose by 3%. “Each year the evidence becomes stronger and stronger that the carbon tax is driving environmental gains,” says Stewart Elgie, an economics professor at University of Ottawa and head of Sustainable Prosperity, a pro-green think-tank. At the same time, BC’s economy has kept pace with the rest of the country.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2014/07/british-...
I'm not sure I trust future projections much from the EIA; they are extremely conservative in terms of being unable to imagine non-fossil fuel energy. They've been consistently wrong on renewable technology as well:
http://cleantechnica.com/2016/05/15/us-eia-responds-cleantec...
I don't mean to diminish the excellent work they do. But for projections like this they must necessarily embody lots of opinion, and there's a good chance that their opinions embody the slow-change mindset of the energy industry.
I would bet with hybrid (and arguably electric) cars being as usable as their ICE cousins that the demand for transportation fuel will become far more elastic.
That's because gas is inelastic. That doesn't mean a price increase wouldn't have a negative effect.
Source: I work at a tax policy nonprofit. Someone in the office probably would've mentioned it if such a tax were around the corner.
From the article, it looks like the current bill is "Climate Protection and Justice Act of 2015". I propose instead the "Save our Children Act". Hard to be against that.
And that's a lot more people who tend to be much poorer than even the poor rural Americans.
The argument goes, this is exactly why a carbon tax is needed. The externalities of using fossil fuels aren't captured in the price, leading to overconsumption. There are plenty of ways to mitigate impact, either by applying a graduated subsidy to low-income populations, etc. Allowing folks to continue to live in a financially unsustainable way doesn't seem to be the answer...