On the Florida and Texas coasts the groundwater is brackish, and with the increasing sea levels from AGW, that salinity is intruding further and further inland.
Draining aquifers and lower levels of rainfall in FL are definitely also contributing (as are things like the Turkey Point plant near Miami) but the moderate sea level increases in FL and parts of the Gulf coast are also having an effect on rising salinity in aquifers. Increased storm surges and sea level rises have driven salinity further inland. So you're right that are also other factors, but one root cause is the effect of rising sea levels. Consider what's happening in Miami carefully.
Climate change is going to cause a lot of increasing problems. Brackish groundwater, loss of drinking water, fires, flash floods in areas that have never experienced them or been designed to cope with them, large scale flooding, loss of farmland, loss of commercial areas including ports and transport hubs, tornadoes, hurricanes, and larger and more damaging storms - generally creeping loss of habitable infrastructure, and increasing damage to supply chains.
Anyone who thinks owning a property somehow insulates them from change is going to be in for nasty surprises.
If anything, owning a property ties one to the fate of a geographic location, and the oncoming climate change means the function and utility of lots of geography will change rapidly.
Yes, I know there are parts of Orange County that have water injection wells that pump water into the ground along the coast to keep fresh water in the aquifer to prevent it filling with brackish water. Some googling around shows it might be called the Talbert Seawater Intrusion Barrier.
I remember touring the sanitation plant when I was took an environmental science class in high school. They said they did fourth stage water treatment then injected the treated water into the aquifer. They are right near Talbert. It is going to be difficult to fight this tide.
You are right to be suspicious. While the original author of the article isn't from the site - it is very very interesting to see it propagated by Russian sources.
Two sides of the same coin but the groundwater problem seems easier to solve. Not because it is technically easier but because the incentives for (rich countries) seem to be a lot stronger. Preventing the own area from flooding is way less abstract than indirectly caused deforestation somewhere in the world, with effects that will be felt only years or decades into the future.
Without wanting to highjack this submission (the Amazon submission didn't gain traction, unfortunately) but any ideas how this problem could be solved and how one could contribute to a solution?
On an individual basis, apart from zero-cost sustainable habits, if you are capable, become a master of science, attempting to solve energy, material, carbon and climate issue at a physics level. If you are a craftsman, observe all the day-to-day activities of humans, tinker/hack and attempt to solve the same workflows more sustainably.
If you have a solution either through hacks or science, you'll have unbelievable amount of capital coming to you to scale your solution. Capitalists will be tripping over themselves to hand you money.
Here's what will 100% not work -- Activism or Trying to 'Policy' out of your way of Climate Change problems.
Also, no government will ever fund your crazy little idea that has 0.0001% chance of succeeding with 10000x impact. Here's who may fund it -- your favorite evil Billionaire.
Markets and capitalism are part of the solution, of course, but you absolutely do need policies to direct all that energy, at a high level.
Absent "policies" and enforcement, the cheapest way for a factory to dispose of waste is to dump it in the river. Same thing applies to CO2: dumping it in the atmosphere is cheap right now because the policies to deal with that externality aren't quite there.
An obvious example of a policy that might help would be a carbon tax that makes more carbon-efficient things more economically appealing.
Carbon tax gets proposed often, but it does not work on its own as a singular policy. Existing implementations of this see the money raised by the carbon tax diverted to equally environmentally costly ventures. There really is no easy way to incentivize a society driven by capital to be environmentally responsible because capitalism necessitates a near-sighted and self-centered approach to these things.
Take the focus on quarterlies- a company may be doomed long term by the decisions made in the present, but as long as they reflect positively in the quarterlies the people making the decisions stand to gain significantly more than they will eventually lose when the company collapses. Its this mindset that we have to fight if we hope to effect any real limit to climate change.
There's no real incentive when climate change occurs on the scale of decades, and anybody with the power to change it thinks (and is thus affected) on the scale of years.
The reason carbon taxes work is because the upper echelons of society are responsible for far, far more carbon dioxide and pollution than the overwhelming majority of the world's population.
Despite what we've been told, the planet won't be saved by worker-bees biking to work. It'll be saved by not having the ultra-wealthy flying everywhere in their private jets, and not spending tens of millions of dollars on multiple homes that are lavishly equipped / use massive quantities of energy to heat and cool / have armies of people keeping them clean and the grounds manicured.
I'm not here to defend the ultra-wealthy but what you're saying doesn't pass the sniff test. Aviation accounts for just 12% of global CO2 emissions and households account for 21%. Obviously, a very small percentage of that could be attributed to the ultra-wealthy flying around in private jets and owning multiple mansions.
On the other hand, a reasonable argument against the wealthy elite would be that they are likely to have the most significant influence on preempting policy that could help deal with climate change. They would have the most vested interest in maintaining the status quo, due to their positions at the head of industry, and their children would suffer the fewest consequences of unmitigated climate change.
But then again, there is also a significant number of voters, at least here in the United States, who aren't going to get behind any policy that may cost jobs and increase energy prices in the immediate term. And then there's China, putting out 27% of total global carbon emissions.
So as convenient as it would be to just blame the rich, climate change is simply too broad an issue to put on the shoulders of any one group or entity, even China.
Things don't just sort out though. Where does that money go? If it goes back into a project that is equally as environmentally destructive, you've just laundered the carbon. Given that the institutions responsible for implementing and enforcing a carbon tax are inextricably linked to the institutions producing some of the highest sources of carbon pollution, I find the proposition that a carbon tax will sort anything out to be unsettling.
Carbon tax is not being proposed on its own, it's meant to be combined with:
- Paying out ~100% of the take equally per-person to make it so it helps rather than hurts the poorest, a "carbon dividend". Poor people use less carbon on average (directly+indirectly) than wealthy people, so they will usually be net beneficiaries.
- Applying an equivalent tax on imports from countries that don't impose a similar tax, called a Border Carbon Adjustment, to prevent domestic manufacturing from being disadvantaged (and actually, it should give domestic manufacturing a boost, since manufacturing locally should be more efficient and hopefully include more green energy in its mix). In the cases where the carbon generation isn't known, due to being unaudited, the maximally pessimistic value can be applied, to encourage companies to audit their supply chain.
> Paying out ~100% of the take equally per-person to make it so it helps rather than hurts the poorest, a "carbon dividend". Poor people use less carbon on average (directly+indirectly) than wealthy people, so they will usually be net beneficiaries.
I think there's an argument that this is impossible to sustain, politically. Once there is a huge new tax, it will be too tempting to redirect growing portions of that funding to other projects. California, for example, has an energy rebate, but the money has also been diverted to bail out the high-speed rail project, for example, and if the state faced a fiscal crisis who knows where the money would go?
> Applying an equivalent tax on imports from countries that don't impose a similar tax, called a Border Carbon Adjustment, to prevent domestic manufacturing from being disadvantaged ... to encourage companies to audit their supply chain
Not that I'm opposed to the cause or aligning incentives in general, but practically, this just seems flat out impossible to implement in any way that has teeth.
Do we punish poor countries to not destroy our local business, or do we let them pollute to not further impoverish them (in which case they will just start doing carbon tax arbitrage)? Both solutions suck, but with different US demographics which makes the local politics tricky even when everyone agrees on terminal values.
Of course, the real elephant in the room is China! China will never let auditors hurt a local business besides occasionally destroying a Jack Ma. The company doing the manufacturing has an enormous incentive to lie since they get to pocket the difference (minus payoffs), the auditor has an incentive to lie as otherwise they would be fired/imprisoned/social-decredited, and the government has and will continue to lie/cheat/steal to protect domestic business. When we inevitably have incontrovertible, unignorable proof they are lying and lied for the last N years, do we start a trade war after local manufacturing has been destroyed and we are fully reliant on their goods? Do we just start a trade war up front to price in the lying from the get go which looks indistinguishable from massive tariffs... in any case, China won't retaliate for what reason?
> ...the maximally pessimistic value can be applied
Consider how truly feckless the US/WHO has been in addressing China on the now probably probable lab leak! There have been no consequences for refusing to cooperate in the investigation of the origins of a disease that has done trillions of dollars in damages and killed 5 million people (China threatened to withhold medical supplies at the start of the pandemic, so it goes, and its probably not within the interests of our own elites, either). Even if you think China has the same goal of reducing climate change, they will still keep two sets of books (or more!).
Anyway, this is a sort of visibility/legibility problem into other countries that feels really hard to solve politically. Every local actor is strongly incentivized to defect which makes the system untenable locally. It reminds me of tax collectors in medieval Europe, except, you know, it would be for the whole world.
Very good points about the political and practical difficulty. And you’re right that there would be large incentives to cheat and lean on your auditors. I don’t have a ready answer for that part of the problem, but I think it’s worth trying to start implementing regardless, because it’s the only proposal I’ve seen that I think has a chance of altering behavior enough to hit our carbon targets - we need to start pricing in these externalities and letting the market adjust toward better solutions. In the beginning, the $/ton would be minor, and would escalate over time, which would give us time to build out the infrastructure and solve other issues before the incentives to cheat got really large. And the foreknowledge of the schedule would allow for investment to anticipate needs.
Or perhaps we need to wait a bit longer for the pain to really start being felt broadly, and then we can finally get on with doing what we know we need to do.
Carbon tax works fine if politians are willing to stick to it.
First set some goals and make sure that those goals need to be met. For example, 0 net CO2 emissions in 2050, 50% less than 1990 emissions in 2030.
Then announce that each year, CO2 tax will be set to have effect. I.e., plot how to go from today to 2050, how much CO2 emission is allowed for each year and an estimate what to CO2 tax will be.
The CO2 can just be a general tax, and income tax can be reduced to compensate. No need for the government to spend all of it on new technology. Of course, some programs to develop markets may help.
When CO2 costs are more or less predictable, companies will quickly figure out ways to avoid CO2 emissions.
There is one big if, if the government cannot find a way to grand permits for green energy, transmission of green energy, etc. then the standard of living may quickly go down.
==Here's what will 100% not work -- Activism or Trying to 'Policy' out of your way of Climate Change problems.==
Capitalism and Free Market are solutions today exactly because we have aligned our "policy" to make clean energy more attractive to capitalists. People quickly forget policies like the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 [1] which invested $80 billion in clean energy. Tesla might not exist today if the DOE didn't loan them $465 million as part of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 [2].
The $465 million loan was given in April 2010. Tesla IPO'd in in June 2010 at a $1.7 billion valuation [1]. Maybe someone else would have given them the low-interest loan, we'll never know. We do know that this loan and the government subsidized EV tax credits helped them weather some very rough cashflow years.
Yes, Capitalism will surely solve the problem that Capitalism wrought, and using tools like Regulation and Policy is sure to hamper Capitalism and not help consumers or the environment at all!
How sad it is that the comment suggesting we try to not continue overpopulating the globe is downvoted while this propaganda piece isn't.
If by "we" you mean "the first world as it devolves into wealth inequality", sure, but it's clear there's nearly 8 billion people, so a 2.4 fertility rate not projected to turn til the end of the century probably still leaves us with 9 billion people by 2070 don't you think?
And indeed, it is a massive problem that we face, but do you truly think proposing regulation-free unhampered-by-policy capital-c Capitalism - in an era we are watching abuse against employees rise while wages drop - is the answer? I find that laughably propagandist.
Imposing population limits in the developed world won’t change anything other than make population decrease problems occur faster. If this rate of birth decline continues, we’ll have a super healthy green planet, and no humans to inhabit it.
This isn’t an argument against solar technologies et. al. It’s just the next problem that we don’t have an Al Gore for trumpeting it as an issue before it was widely known.
> Imposing population limits in the developed world
It is hard to read this and mention of "Al Gore" as anything other than arguing in bad faith. No one would propose to introduce population control in a place where that is not a problem.
Instead, reasonable actors would propose that we work to dismantle the global inequality that incentivizes impoverished families in the exploited third-world to birth many children by reigning in the ability for corporations to act as slavers in the third world and simultaneously pretend to be beacons of progress in the first. Wealth inequality, or maybe more precisely poverty, is a top driver of population growth, as children are cheaper to acquire than labor so those who need currency desperately are incentivized to birth children (and into horrendous conditions at that).
Reforming the nature of globalist capitalism would surely both help to curb population growth in these places as they became less impoverished and greatly improve our ethics.
Sure, and Capitalism devolves into late-stage regulatory-capture wealth-inequality race-to-the-bottom massive globally scaled abuses of both people and the planet. To propose that we just simply have to let "capitalists" fix the solution they have wrought is facile at best, and honestly strikes me as clearly malicious when in the same breath it is implied regulation and policy are the the enemy.
I completely agree with you there. Capitalism got us into this mess- it's naive to think it will get us out of it. I was just pointing out that population control is a bit of a "knife's edge" discussion: there are ways to discuss it that don't devolve into eugenics.. But most arguments inevitably do.
I'm gonna suggest that electricity is the single cause of the all environmental problems. Haven't pretty much all of environmental problems occurred since its unwise discovery? And, you know, electricity and man-made climate change are both about energy. So there you go.
How does this solve the problem of externalities that exists today? And what do you do if no genius ever comes along with such a "silver bullet" solution to invite venture funding? Keep waiting and hope they are born before the externalities catch up and it's too late?
Property Rights, the bedrock of capitalism, if properly enforced, by penalizing individuals/corps that pollutes/destroys someone else's (including public) property, takes care of most governmental action that is needed.
"Enforce property and individual rights and get out of the way".
I fail to see how capitalism and free markets, which optimize for profit above all else can have any incentive in reigning in climate change.
There is zero money in preventing deforestation. There is zero money in carbon capture. There is zero money in keeping ocean’s level low.
But there is money in building levees and relocating sea-side communities.
So technically capitalism will favor burning fossil fuels over not doing it. And later when problems like these start to arise, capitalists will create companies to cope with the broken climate and make money off it.
I suppose you can just schedule a cron to submit in 10 years the same post with updated number to say 12B :)
Even with population control (suppose we found a way to do it and managed to avoid the large negative consequences of it which would be plenty) the uncontested growing consumption by the current population would do the planet anyway.
Speaking about solutions - until significant part of Sahara desert and the likes aren't covered by solar panels, i wouldn't believe that anybody (who matters) is taking the climate change seriously.
> Speaking about solutions - until significant part of Sahara desert and the likes aren't covered by solar panels, i wouldn't believe that anybody (who matters) is taking the climate change seriously
The caveat about population control, is different than how we, humans, do with all other wild-life on planet earth, we cannot reduce the available food and habitat to lower the carrying capacity, compensate for the missing predators by killing individuals in the population, or slow the population's ability to reproduce..
We have to come up with a ethic solution. But people cannot put 3-5 kids or more on earth and don't have the means to raise them accordingly.
I know a family that had 13 children. They had "the means to raise them accordingly" (basically they lived in a middle class neighborhood, drove older cars, didn't hire anyone to do work around their house - despite the father having a very high paying chief financial officer position with a large company). So... is it okay for those kinds of people to have 3-5+ kids?
it seems that the main issue is that some invested in concentrated solar while photovoltaics energy cost fell from being 2x expensive to being 4x cheaper of the concentrated and just beating everything out at $0.03/KWh. As i said - cover the desert in solar panels. Transmission is only 7% loss to Berlin.
Instead Europe is building gas pipelines from Russia and others. Again, money talk, and that clearly shows that nobody takes climate change seriously.
You need to be careful with this framing and also think about 'Population Pressure' in regards to most developed countries - https://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk/
This is a done deal for developed countries. All of them are below the 2% replacement rate (many very far below). The places where the replacement rate is at or above 2% (often very far above 2%) are places where non-white people primarily live. Suggesting that they need to stop having so many children smacks of racism so it is politically and socially not something that people are willing to talk about.
It's not about race it's about access to modern medicine and the jobs an industrialized economy brings. The reason access to these things correlates with race in some nations is, said briefly, colonialism and its continuing impact. There are plenty of nations with birth rates below replacement where white people are by far the minority as well.
You’re neglecting per capita resource usage. Population control in low-usage high-birth rate countries has insignificant effects. Reducing usage in high-usage countries has outsized effects, and a low replacement rate is not enough to mitigate them.
The problem is more nuanced than that and just throwing out "Population control." is completely meaningless.
You could cull three billion people of the lowest emitters and it would have as much of an effect as halving the CO2 emissions of the top 1% of emitters.[1] And considering that to avoid the worst of the climate crisis we need action immediately or as close to it as possible, waiting for people to die away will not help us. If the entire planet stopped having babies today we would wait 65 years to get to half the current population, and half the emissions.
At best, and I would argue even that is a stretch, population control is one small part of a long term strategy. But it is by no means a solution, so throwing it out there every time people talk about sustainability does nothing but derail the conversation.
What we really need is to to make consumption as sustainable as possible and reduce it where possible, especially for the top consumers. That is not only more feasible in the short term, it is probably more ethical as well.
It’s basically a foregone conclusion that the water levels will rise and envelop a large number of properties that exist due to the value of coastal real estate.
Humans, because we are mostly water, love being close to water and seeing water.
The question in my mind is whether we will get a waterworld type situation, or if everything will be left to be destroyed and we will re settle the new coasts.
There isn't enough water for a "waterworld situation", the icecaps have been completely gone in the distant past and there were rainforests near the poles.
There also won't be a singular event that will be over, coasts are going to slowly walk inland.
Always worth pointing out the absolute pointlessness of 'could', 'will... ?' etc. articles. I mean, I 'could' start a company that cures cancer, solves poverty, takes us to new galaxies and elevates humanity to a transcendant level of conciousness. Whether I will or not is an entirely different question!
'Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who wrote about it in 2009, although the principle is much older.[1][2] It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.'.
There is one thing I don't understand about the article. The rise in groundwater level should follow the average increase in sea level. It is not like a big wave would suddenly affect the groundwater level.
Assuming houses last for 50 years and during the next 50 years the sealevel can increase by around 50cm, it should be easy to check if buildings near the coast are high enough that they can accept this change in sealevel.
Of course, damage done by flooding does depend on how big waves are. So you need levees and seawalls long before you get a groundwater problem.
That said, you don't want to pump fresh water out of the ground close to the sea (unless you inject at least as much fresh water). But that is independent of sealevel rising.
Finally, plenty of Dutch houses are built in swamps below sealevel. The technology exists.
I haven't read the article yet but one thing that makes more complicated in the US is the widespread use of septic tanks. The leach field will flood before the actual surface.
Most septic tanks are not in coastal properties. The water table isn't going to change for a property unless you're right on the water or living on wide low lying march/delta type areas.
All those dense spots in Florida and along the Gulf are also more likely than most US urban areas to use septic tanks. That's a lot of brackish poop, clogged toilets, and environmental contamination coming in the next few decades.
Hahaha, spoken like someone who hasn't lived in Florida.
Miami-Dade is full of septic tank. I think the state has about ~3M of them total. No one thought about the coastal water table when installing them, and I honestly don't know if they do even now.
Sea level rise in itself is a complicated subject. Some regions of the ocean see easily twice the global average of sea level rise, while other regions barely change (currents and winds have a large effect on sea level). On the coast this gets further complicated because the ground itself is also moving up or down (mostly due to settling, or century-long rebound from the loss of glaciers) [1].
I would assume ground water adds another layer of complexity since it also depends on local geography
> Of course, damage done by flooding does depend on how big waves are. So you need levees and seawalls long before you get a groundwater problem.
Actually Germany and Netherlands experienced massive floods this year with increased river volumes in the Maas due to excess rain and ice melt in the Alps. At least 200 people died, 10s of thousands relocated.
My point is not all your flood threats are downstream from you.
> Finally, plenty of Dutch houses are built in swamps below sealevel. The technology exists.
The dutch have centuries of know how and an entirely separate body to oversee all water management the Rijkswaterstaat. To assume that their model can be easily copied is a massive underestimation of the problem/solutions.
There is an interesting thing related to the recent floods that happened in Begium, Germany and The Netherlands. The Netherlands spends quite a bit of effort estimating flood risks, and for more important water defenses tries to get the chance of disaster down to about one in 10000 years.
However, it seems that this calculation is only done for the lower parts of the country. The Meuse was only taken seriously after a couple of floods in the 1990s (and works were just far enough in The Netherlands that places along the Meuse were mostly fine).
However, for smaller rivers, nobody seems to care.
>Water will leach inside homes, she said, through basement cracks. Toilets may become chronically backed up. Raw sewage may seep through manholes. Brackish water will corrode sewer and water pipes and inundate building foundations. And most hazardous of all, water percolating upward may flow through contaminants buried in the soil, spreading them underground and eventually releasing them into people’s homes.
This describes my experience living in Miami. People are already acclimated to saltwater pouring out of drains during "king tides".
Either side of the coin, it's still pretty wild to watch it happen. We live on a point in Baltimore harbor and had the perfect storm of both water being pushed up the harbor, big tides and sheets of rain. By the time the tide came in the second time, we started seeing water pushing up through the sump pumps in our basements. The pressure from the water table underneath our home was so great that water was pushing it's way through the floors. This was the first time we've ever seen this happen down here, this is an area with significant history. I would not be surprised if this became common place in the future.
The entire Inner Harbor is within a floodplain, with the southernmost areas being within the 100yr FP. What you are describing is not unheard of, but simply not common.
British Columbia has just experienced substantial flooding that wasn’t related to being coastal[0][1][2]. I think it exemplifies how we need to mind our relationship with the world - everywhere.
What I'm really worried about is the people who think this kind of damage is good per se, either out of general misanthropy or some sort of tribal hatred. Meeting these kind of challenges are well within our technical capability, but I fear not within our moral/financial/political capability.
100 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadWhat happens is the freshwater aquifers are drained giving the salt/brackish water space to intrude.
https://cnsmaryland.org/2020/11/23/salt-levels-in-floridas-g...
https://www.miamidade.gov/global/water/conservation/saltwate...
Anyone who thinks owning a property somehow insulates them from change is going to be in for nasty surprises.
Also if you are Mike Posey please blink once.
Good catch.
Two sides of the same coin but the groundwater problem seems easier to solve. Not because it is technically easier but because the incentives for (rich countries) seem to be a lot stronger. Preventing the own area from flooding is way less abstract than indirectly caused deforestation somewhere in the world, with effects that will be felt only years or decades into the future.
Without wanting to highjack this submission (the Amazon submission didn't gain traction, unfortunately) but any ideas how this problem could be solved and how one could contribute to a solution?
On an individual basis, apart from zero-cost sustainable habits, if you are capable, become a master of science, attempting to solve energy, material, carbon and climate issue at a physics level. If you are a craftsman, observe all the day-to-day activities of humans, tinker/hack and attempt to solve the same workflows more sustainably.
If you have a solution either through hacks or science, you'll have unbelievable amount of capital coming to you to scale your solution. Capitalists will be tripping over themselves to hand you money.
Here's what will 100% not work -- Activism or Trying to 'Policy' out of your way of Climate Change problems.
Also, no government will ever fund your crazy little idea that has 0.0001% chance of succeeding with 10000x impact. Here's who may fund it -- your favorite evil Billionaire.
Absent "policies" and enforcement, the cheapest way for a factory to dispose of waste is to dump it in the river. Same thing applies to CO2: dumping it in the atmosphere is cheap right now because the policies to deal with that externality aren't quite there.
An obvious example of a policy that might help would be a carbon tax that makes more carbon-efficient things more economically appealing.
Take the focus on quarterlies- a company may be doomed long term by the decisions made in the present, but as long as they reflect positively in the quarterlies the people making the decisions stand to gain significantly more than they will eventually lose when the company collapses. Its this mindset that we have to fight if we hope to effect any real limit to climate change.
There's no real incentive when climate change occurs on the scale of decades, and anybody with the power to change it thinks (and is thus affected) on the scale of years.
Despite what we've been told, the planet won't be saved by worker-bees biking to work. It'll be saved by not having the ultra-wealthy flying everywhere in their private jets, and not spending tens of millions of dollars on multiple homes that are lavishly equipped / use massive quantities of energy to heat and cool / have armies of people keeping them clean and the grounds manicured.
On the other hand, a reasonable argument against the wealthy elite would be that they are likely to have the most significant influence on preempting policy that could help deal with climate change. They would have the most vested interest in maintaining the status quo, due to their positions at the head of industry, and their children would suffer the fewest consequences of unmitigated climate change.
But then again, there is also a significant number of voters, at least here in the United States, who aren't going to get behind any policy that may cost jobs and increase energy prices in the immediate term. And then there's China, putting out 27% of total global carbon emissions.
So as convenient as it would be to just blame the rich, climate change is simply too broad an issue to put on the shoulders of any one group or entity, even China.
Carbon tax is not being proposed on its own, it's meant to be combined with:
- Paying out ~100% of the take equally per-person to make it so it helps rather than hurts the poorest, a "carbon dividend". Poor people use less carbon on average (directly+indirectly) than wealthy people, so they will usually be net beneficiaries.
- Applying an equivalent tax on imports from countries that don't impose a similar tax, called a Border Carbon Adjustment, to prevent domestic manufacturing from being disadvantaged (and actually, it should give domestic manufacturing a boost, since manufacturing locally should be more efficient and hopefully include more green energy in its mix). In the cases where the carbon generation isn't known, due to being unaudited, the maximally pessimistic value can be applied, to encourage companies to audit their supply chain.
I think there's an argument that this is impossible to sustain, politically. Once there is a huge new tax, it will be too tempting to redirect growing portions of that funding to other projects. California, for example, has an energy rebate, but the money has also been diverted to bail out the high-speed rail project, for example, and if the state faced a fiscal crisis who knows where the money would go?
Not that I'm opposed to the cause or aligning incentives in general, but practically, this just seems flat out impossible to implement in any way that has teeth.
Do we punish poor countries to not destroy our local business, or do we let them pollute to not further impoverish them (in which case they will just start doing carbon tax arbitrage)? Both solutions suck, but with different US demographics which makes the local politics tricky even when everyone agrees on terminal values.
Of course, the real elephant in the room is China! China will never let auditors hurt a local business besides occasionally destroying a Jack Ma. The company doing the manufacturing has an enormous incentive to lie since they get to pocket the difference (minus payoffs), the auditor has an incentive to lie as otherwise they would be fired/imprisoned/social-decredited, and the government has and will continue to lie/cheat/steal to protect domestic business. When we inevitably have incontrovertible, unignorable proof they are lying and lied for the last N years, do we start a trade war after local manufacturing has been destroyed and we are fully reliant on their goods? Do we just start a trade war up front to price in the lying from the get go which looks indistinguishable from massive tariffs... in any case, China won't retaliate for what reason?
> ...the maximally pessimistic value can be applied
Consider how truly feckless the US/WHO has been in addressing China on the now probably probable lab leak! There have been no consequences for refusing to cooperate in the investigation of the origins of a disease that has done trillions of dollars in damages and killed 5 million people (China threatened to withhold medical supplies at the start of the pandemic, so it goes, and its probably not within the interests of our own elites, either). Even if you think China has the same goal of reducing climate change, they will still keep two sets of books (or more!).
Anyway, this is a sort of visibility/legibility problem into other countries that feels really hard to solve politically. Every local actor is strongly incentivized to defect which makes the system untenable locally. It reminds me of tax collectors in medieval Europe, except, you know, it would be for the whole world.
Or perhaps we need to wait a bit longer for the pain to really start being felt broadly, and then we can finally get on with doing what we know we need to do.
First set some goals and make sure that those goals need to be met. For example, 0 net CO2 emissions in 2050, 50% less than 1990 emissions in 2030.
Then announce that each year, CO2 tax will be set to have effect. I.e., plot how to go from today to 2050, how much CO2 emission is allowed for each year and an estimate what to CO2 tax will be.
The CO2 can just be a general tax, and income tax can be reduced to compensate. No need for the government to spend all of it on new technology. Of course, some programs to develop markets may help.
When CO2 costs are more or less predictable, companies will quickly figure out ways to avoid CO2 emissions.
There is one big if, if the government cannot find a way to grand permits for green energy, transmission of green energy, etc. then the standard of living may quickly go down.
Dumping waste/co2 is a violation of someone else's property rights. Try dumping waste into your neighbor's property and see what happens.
The reason why externalities happen is because government is not enforcing property rights
And who does all that measuring?
Essentially, it's Carbon Tax.
Capitalism and Free Market are solutions today exactly because we have aligned our "policy" to make clean energy more attractive to capitalists. People quickly forget policies like the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 [1] which invested $80 billion in clean energy. Tesla might not exist today if the DOE didn't loan them $465 million as part of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 [2].
[1] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/0...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/id/100759230
Tesla took a cheap government loan when it was available.
Do you really think, Musk wouldn't have raised the piddly $500 Million from on his multiple silicon valley buddies? (including Thiel, Page)?
[1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/tesla-10-anniversary-ipo-el...
How sad it is that the comment suggesting we try to not continue overpopulating the globe is downvoted while this propaganda piece isn't.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53409521
And indeed, it is a massive problem that we face, but do you truly think proposing regulation-free unhampered-by-policy capital-c Capitalism - in an era we are watching abuse against employees rise while wages drop - is the answer? I find that laughably propagandist.
This isn’t an argument against solar technologies et. al. It’s just the next problem that we don’t have an Al Gore for trumpeting it as an issue before it was widely known.
It is hard to read this and mention of "Al Gore" as anything other than arguing in bad faith. No one would propose to introduce population control in a place where that is not a problem.
Instead, reasonable actors would propose that we work to dismantle the global inequality that incentivizes impoverished families in the exploited third-world to birth many children by reigning in the ability for corporations to act as slavers in the third world and simultaneously pretend to be beacons of progress in the first. Wealth inequality, or maybe more precisely poverty, is a top driver of population growth, as children are cheaper to acquire than labor so those who need currency desperately are incentivized to birth children (and into horrendous conditions at that).
Reforming the nature of globalist capitalism would surely both help to curb population growth in these places as they became less impoverished and greatly improve our ethics.
Every business on planet earth will hand you money for reducing input costs.
Once again think long-term. Short-term the externalities does get pushed around
Congratulations on the most bloodless hot take I’ve read on HN by a country mile
Not if they can get someone else to pay. And not when the benefits are years or decades away.
Two questions:
1. Are you familiar with the concept of the tragedy of the commons? [0]
2. How comfortable are you with the idea that capitalism and free markets are policies?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Property Rights, the bedrock of capitalism, if properly enforced, by penalizing individuals/corps that pollutes/destroys someone else's (including public) property, takes care of most governmental action that is needed.
"Enforce property and individual rights and get out of the way".
There is zero money in preventing deforestation. There is zero money in carbon capture. There is zero money in keeping ocean’s level low.
But there is money in building levees and relocating sea-side communities.
So technically capitalism will favor burning fossil fuels over not doing it. And later when problems like these start to arise, capitalists will create companies to cope with the broken climate and make money off it.
Even with population control (suppose we found a way to do it and managed to avoid the large negative consequences of it which would be plenty) the uncontested growing consumption by the current population would do the planet anyway.
Speaking about solutions - until significant part of Sahara desert and the likes aren't covered by solar panels, i wouldn't believe that anybody (who matters) is taking the climate change seriously.
I think it is harder than we think, at least for the goals that Europe wants: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o
The caveat about population control, is different than how we, humans, do with all other wild-life on planet earth, we cannot reduce the available food and habitat to lower the carrying capacity, compensate for the missing predators by killing individuals in the population, or slow the population's ability to reproduce..
We have to come up with a ethic solution. But people cannot put 3-5 kids or more on earth and don't have the means to raise them accordingly.
If you try, won't some people somewhere on the Internet, get angry at the ideas you have, and start writing angry things to and about you?
it seems that the main issue is that some invested in concentrated solar while photovoltaics energy cost fell from being 2x expensive to being 4x cheaper of the concentrated and just beating everything out at $0.03/KWh. As i said - cover the desert in solar panels. Transmission is only 7% loss to Berlin.
Instead Europe is building gas pipelines from Russia and others. Again, money talk, and that clearly shows that nobody takes climate change seriously.
Apparently not, look:
https://www.un.org/en/desa/world-population-projected-reach-...
"World population projected to reach 9.8 billion in 2050, and 11.2 billion in 2100"
It's slowing down. But increasing a lot, in a few countries. (I didn't downvote b.t.w)
All BRICs are below replacement already.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_...
You could cull three billion people of the lowest emitters and it would have as much of an effect as halving the CO2 emissions of the top 1% of emitters.[1] And considering that to avoid the worst of the climate crisis we need action immediately or as close to it as possible, waiting for people to die away will not help us. If the entire planet stopped having babies today we would wait 65 years to get to half the current population, and half the emissions.
At best, and I would argue even that is a stretch, population control is one small part of a long term strategy. But it is by no means a solution, so throwing it out there every time people talk about sustainability does nothing but derail the conversation.
What we really need is to to make consumption as sustainable as possible and reduce it where possible, especially for the top consumers. That is not only more feasible in the short term, it is probably more ethical as well.
[1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-ric...
Humans, because we are mostly water, love being close to water and seeing water.
The question in my mind is whether we will get a waterworld type situation, or if everything will be left to be destroyed and we will re settle the new coasts.
There also won't be a singular event that will be over, coasts are going to slowly walk inland.
I've heard plenty of attempts to explain thalassophilia, but I have to admit I've never heard that one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
'Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who wrote about it in 2009, although the principle is much older.[1][2] It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.'.
Assuming houses last for 50 years and during the next 50 years the sealevel can increase by around 50cm, it should be easy to check if buildings near the coast are high enough that they can accept this change in sealevel.
Of course, damage done by flooding does depend on how big waves are. So you need levees and seawalls long before you get a groundwater problem.
That said, you don't want to pump fresh water out of the ground close to the sea (unless you inject at least as much fresh water). But that is independent of sealevel rising.
Finally, plenty of Dutch houses are built in swamps below sealevel. The technology exists.
Check out this map of population density: https://vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/metropolita...
All those dense spots in Florida and along the Gulf are also more likely than most US urban areas to use septic tanks. That's a lot of brackish poop, clogged toilets, and environmental contamination coming in the next few decades.
Miami-Dade is full of septic tank. I think the state has about ~3M of them total. No one thought about the coastal water table when installing them, and I honestly don't know if they do even now.
See: https://www.gainesville.com/story/sports/columns/dooley/2019...
Situation is similar across the whole Gulf Coast. You really shouldn't assume any of this was rationally planned.
I would assume ground water adds another layer of complexity since it also depends on local geography
1: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
Actually Germany and Netherlands experienced massive floods this year with increased river volumes in the Maas due to excess rain and ice melt in the Alps. At least 200 people died, 10s of thousands relocated.
My point is not all your flood threats are downstream from you.
> Finally, plenty of Dutch houses are built in swamps below sealevel. The technology exists.
The dutch have centuries of know how and an entirely separate body to oversee all water management the Rijkswaterstaat. To assume that their model can be easily copied is a massive underestimation of the problem/solutions.
However, it seems that this calculation is only done for the lower parts of the country. The Meuse was only taken seriously after a couple of floods in the 1990s (and works were just far enough in The Netherlands that places along the Meuse were mostly fine).
However, for smaller rivers, nobody seems to care.
https://www.opb.org/article/2021/07/29/southern-oregon-wells...
https://nmpoliticalreport.com/2017/10/16/running-dry-groundw...
This describes my experience living in Miami. People are already acclimated to saltwater pouring out of drains during "king tides".
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-floods-su...
[1] https://youtu.be/c-zANcnwY34
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/merritt-resi...
https://twitter.com/LorenzoRaplili/status/146778222144867942...
https://www.abc.net.au/tok-pisin/2021-12-07/king-tide-png/13...
https://www.looppng.com/png-news/tides-continue-nip-107547
https://postcourier.com.pg/king-tides-wreak-havoc-on-islands...