I'm the sort of "environmentalist" who just likes a better general environment, and it's a big reason we have an electric mower. I loved my old reliable duct-taped Honda mower, but I love even more not dealing with the sounds and smells of a gas mower. One of the nicest things about electrification is the quiet.
Is there a way to access that chart as a Google Doc, an Excel file, an HTML table, or basically any other format besides an image ? The image is pretty hard to browse.
Something I don't see discussed enough when we're talking about limiting AC/heater/other electrical usage, etc. Is that under reasonable assumptions (e.g., $50 per ton CO2 externality cost), the retail price of electricity is often already too high relative to the societal marginal cost. So just the cost you pay to your utility to use your AC is already higher than if a bunch of environmental economists got together and got to play dictator and made the retail electricity rates what they "should" be based on the marginal cost of electricity and the externalities that generating the electricity produces.
Mostly this is because the electricity industry is so heavily fixed cost based. The marginal cost of a kWh is usually in the 2 to 3 cent range. Most utility rate setters know this and always argue that utility bills should have some something like a fixed contracted demand charge of like $60 and then the per kWh price should be like 3 cents. The regulators then promptly ignore them and tell them they can have a fixed charge of $2 and a 20 cent per kWh rate because voters don't like fixed charges.
So the typical spread between retail price of kWh and marginal cost of a kWh is somewhere in the 10 cent range for the average American. But in places like California it can be much higher. And in some places the spread is lower and what I'm saying here doesn't apply to those places.
That said, if all the societal cost of pollution and carbon is less than that 10 cent gap (and if we use the realistic CO2 offset numbers found in Scott's post, they are), it means society is not over-using ACs and heaters. The benefit we get from them are greater than the cost they incur, including the added pollution and CO2.
I'm not sure what this implies for someone who cares about CO2 offsets though. On one hand, your utility bill is already priced such that if running your AC is worth the utility bill increase, it's also worth the carbon increase it causes. But on the other hand, utilities/society aren't using that money to offset CO2 like they would if there were carbon tax or cap'n'trade, they're using it to pay for all those fixed costs the regulators won't let them charge fixed amounts for. Therefore, if you don't do anything, the CO2 will be left unoffsetted. So maybe you use the AC/heater as much as you'd like given the utility bill increases it causes, then completely separately from the decision on how much AC to use, go and offset that amount?
This would all be much easier if we just had a carbon tax where revenues went to CO2 offsets or other societal improvements. It's really hard to unilaterally get this right. *sigh*
For California you also need to include the cost of wildfires, which seems to be "all the money they collect, and then some." According to the courts, anyway.
Does that cost actually *include* the other costs? If all of what you're paying goes to the cost of generating the electricity, then these costs "should" be *added* to what you're already paying (or some other cost to compensate people harmed by carbon emissions).
You reach societal optimal production/consumption when you price at MC. This is because if the incremental benefit society gets from one more unit of consumption is greater than the incremental cost of that production, you want people to consume more. But if the incremental benefit is smaller than the incremental cost, you want them to consume less. This reaches equilibrium where marginal cost is equal to marginal revenue, MC=MR.
For most industries, free markets and perfect competition will eventually reach that point.
But it never will for natural monopolies like electric utilities.
Because marginal cost is always below average cost, the utility will not collect enough revenue to maintain operations if it's subject to competition. Roughly what happens now (when there's no competition), is large politically connected companies with large load will go to the utility and say, "I don' want you to charge me your average cost, I want a discount. I'll go build my factory somewhere that will give me a discount if you don't give me one. I know you could price down to your marginal cost and still be ok." And usually utilities give in and give them some type of price between MC and AC. However, this means some other group of customers is paying for infrastructure that the large factory is using.
Once the infrastructure is built, it's 'rational' for the utility to agree to that bargain (price below average cost) to any customer who has a serious threat of actually leaving for some other utility. So under competition, utilities would realize that they'd never be able to recoup the cost of infrastructure and wouldn't make necessary investments for a reliable electric system.
(Note this is different for industries that aren't natural monopolies, even if they have lots of fixed costs, because eventually they'll reach output levels where the average cost and marginal cost converges. What makes a natural monopoly a natural monopoly is that they'll never reach that point)
But none of this changes the fact that society is still at it's optimal production/consumption point when the utility is pricing at it's marginal cost. You don't want to include the ATC less MC portion of costs when figuring out where the most efficient price/quantity is. So the utility needs to have some other way of collecting those fixed costs that wouldn't be collected if it charged MC (in the past, economists have even proposed things like have utilities price at MC and then subsidize them via taxes for the infrastructure investment shortfalls).
So if we're including CO2 externalities, the societal optimal price is the utilities' MC plus the externality, not the utilities' AC plus externalities.
I'm aware of how monopolies work, but that seems rather orthogonal to how externalities are accounted for. I think this sentence of yours is the upshot:
"So if we're including CO2 externalities, the societal optimal price is the utilities' MC plus the externality, not the utilities' AC plus externalities."
We can have a carbon tax no problem. But one where the revenues actually end up reducing CO2 emission is a different story. We've had gasoline taxes for decades, and big chunks of that revenue are routinely diverted to purposes other than building roads and bridges.[1] The famous Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement in the 1990s collected an enormous amount of money (in principle $200 billion) from cigarettte manufacturers (who obviously then collected it from smokers), and the stated purpose of this "tax" on cigarettes was to cure the externality of smoking -- to pay for the damages, e.g. costs of treating smokers, and mitigate future harm, e.g. by trying to prevent the next generation from taking up smoking and encouraging present smokers to quit. In the end, very little of that money was spent on anti-smoking initatives[2], and a great deal was diverted to purposes that had nothing to do with paying for externalities, and in cases was even perverse, e.g. according to [3] 75% of the money North Carolina received as of 2016 was actually spent supporting tobacco production (an important tax-revenue-generating industiry in NC to be sure).
So I would say, practically speaking, Step #1 is to find an efficient and effective way to *spend* tax money that accomplishes the object. If that can be done, then how exactly the tax revenue is acquired is not especially urgent. It could certainly come from a carbon tax, in order to serve as an incentive as well as a revenue generation machine, but it could come from general tax revenue as well and that isn't an especially important change. The key is to ensure that a noble-sounding "carbon tax" doesn't degenerate into just another siphon pumping taxpayer dollars into the trough of government swill to which an infinite number of piggies can snuffle up eagerly.
The purpose of a carbon tax is to place incentives into a market economy by making non-carbon-expensive products relatively more profitable. It would be nice to use the profits in beneficial ways but the tax works even if you throw the proceeds into a ditch.
Obviously, rebating all of the proceeds to carbon intensive industries would hamstring the whole thing.
Well, that's *some* proponent's main purpose for a carbon tax, sure. But they're completely delusional in my opinion. I'm sure a carbon tax that is politically sustainable could have *measureable* effects on CO2 emission, because we're pretty good at measuring small numbers these days. But I don't think it will never come even remotely close to changing emittions to the level proponents want to change it. And the history of social engineering through the tax code generally is extremely discouraging, filled with stories of unanticipated side effects and dynamic responses, and no major success stories at all, as far as my memory serves.
So instead I take at face value what different proponents of the carbon tax say, which is that the main purpose of the tax is to collect revenue to ameliorate the externalities of CO2 emission in ways that only government can, because of collective action problems et cetera. This purpose at least has the benefit of not depending on having a crystal ball to predict the social psychology of 330 million people -- you just collect the money and spend it on Remediation Program X, which directly addresses the problem. It *may* be as a side effect of the tax people change their behavior to reduce emissions, but that's just candy on top and you aren't depending on it for the tax to be useful.
But then, as I said, Step #1 is determining what X is.
A carbon tax is a Republican (Capitalist) version of investing government money in solar panels technology and wind. The idea is that if you price the externalities the market takes care of itself.
This is much like how Obama Care was Republican (Heritage Foundation) version of universal health care.
I wouldn't call this a Republican idea. There's even more support among moderate Democrats. But yes, a carbon tax is a lot more palatable to conservatives than other plans like the Green New Deal.
I don't think the comparison to the ACA is a good one. I think universal health care is a good idea -- health care markets suffer from market failures, and are a case where you get a better outcome if the government steps in. Carbon emissions being free, yet having a huge cost to society, is another kind of market failure, and carbon taxes are a very good solution to that problem.
I agree people are underestimating the problems with a carbon tax. One economic modeling study (maybe Pielke or Nordhaus?) found it doesn't take much of the world economy ignoring the tax for most of the efficiency benefit to evaporate as carbon sensitive industry moves to the low or no tax areas. A uniform and substantial worldwide tax is a big if
I think greater efforts should go into designing a market for innovation where rather than someone choosing what to research from the top there are simply major artificial payoffs based on the carbon reduction benefit vs cost of new technologies. This should also have a bigger short term effect on development of transformative technologies vs the carbon tax's more medium to long term effect
Another field with more assurance of working is geoengineering. In "Smart Solutions to Climate Climate Change" the equivalent costs for removing one ton of carbon by air capture was $.05 for Marine Cloud Whitening and about $5 for firing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. The sulfur dioxide costs and benefits should be fairly reliable while the cloud whitening estimate would have to be two orders of magnitude higher to reach the same price, for deployment of each at a level that would reduce temperatures by 2 degrees. A single "anti-rogue" nation could do it alone
A further benefit of developing potential geoengineering techs would be to reduce the number of kids having nightmares about the world ending with a reliable backstop being understood to exist. In the adult realm this should also translate to better policymaking less coloured by fear and desperation
There's a ton of places you could usefully spend tax money to improve the situation. You can obviously spend it on research. The field of climate studies is hideously cramped by a lack of comprehensive data. It's one reason well-informed reasonable people can seriously doubt the relevance of the predictions of global circulation models to reality. The data are, of course, in many cases difficult to gather at the private level because of the need for global coverage -- and this is exactly the kind of thing at which government can be quite good.
Secondly, you can spend it on R&D in bioengineering. The most obvious way to sequester carbon is simply to patch into the existing massive natural carbon flows that go through photosynthesizing organisms. We already know a wide range of organisms from plankton to redwoods are very efficient at pulling CO2 out of the air and turning it into solid stuff -- indeed, the very hydrocarbons the combustion of which concerns us. The obvious way to close the cycle is to find ways to industrialize that, to get the hydrocarbons we combust directly from an engineered organism that uses sunlight and water to make the hydrocarbons. There are obviously practical challenges, but it's a very plausible route forward, because Nature has already shown us it can be done -- we know the biochemical machinery already exists, and we just need to tweak it to meet our industrial needs. Furthermore, it's way less risky than large-scale geoengineering, because it's easy to tune in almost real time. Too much CO2 being produced? Grow some more engineered alga and stash the hydrocarbons in some cave. Too little? Burn some of your stashed hydrocarbons and cut down on the sunlight to the algae (or whatever).
The problem for any private R&D effort is the putative product (engineered biodiesel say) couldn't compete with the stuff pumped from the ground if it has to amortize big fat R&D costs -- the payback is almost certainly too long for private firms. But that's why we have a government, to invest in stuff with a payback period too long for private money, and to compensate for paybacks (reduction of global warming) that the private manufacturer can't directly capture as revenue.
And of course, if the whole hypothesis turns out to be screwy in some major way, e.g. increased CO2 turns out to be the result of global warming and not the cause, government is exactly the kind of people who could have been usefully spending just-in-case Plan B money figuring out how to predict and manage the effects of temperature change about which we can't do anything, or not as much as we hoped.
I wish I could remember the name, but there's a good podcast I heard with people discussing geoengineering. The issue with it is that you're avoiding solving the real problem and trying to put a band-aid on it. The more carbon in the atmosphere, the more you have to do your counteracting geoengineering project, and if you ever stop, you're suddenly in huge trouble. And a lot of these geoengineering ideas may cool down the earth a bit on average, but their effect is not uniform across the globe -- an area that's not cloudy can still get deadly hot, and I wouldn't be surprised if bigger temperature differentials results in more chaotic weather.
I agree it's bad to terrify people about climate change. It's not even helpful -- scared people aren't more likely to act, they just try not to think about the scary thing. We gotta solve the problem, but we'll get it done. It's just that the longer we wait the harder it'll be.
Going back to the issue of carbon sensitive industry moving to places without taxes -- the way to fix this is with a border adjustment. You add a tariff to goods coming in from places without a carbon tax. The EU is working on theirs right now I believe, it's called the CBAM (Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism).
Indeed the risk of a sudden disruption was discussed or even estimated in the Smart Solutions book although not included in their main estimate. It's just that the estimated benefits are so high there's really a case for it. A particular strength of cloud whitening is that it could be deployed locally giving it an ability to reduce equator temperatures specifically which might reduce temperature differentials as a side benefit. (possibly even effective in dampening hurricane intensity) While estimates of the economic effect of warming that I've seen have overall benefits as high as 2 degrees from pre-Industrial, part of the reason for that is that the benefits are focused in northern countries with larger GDPs and the costs more in southern ones with smaller GDPs so there is a problem of higher marginal costs and lower marginal benefits. If cloud whitening were effective we could run right past long term projects with high costs that will - at best - reduce equatorial climate costs. Do pass Go, and immediately collect $200
I don't see it as entirely a band aid aside from that because the direct effect of CO2 doubling is a temperature rise of 1 degree Celsius. It's logarithmic. This is the warming effect that there is actually in the neighborhood of a 97% consensus about. What this means is that high temperature projections rely on CO2 warming causing a cascade of other warming effects. If geoengineering simply counteracted the CO2 warming all the other theorized warming effects are put on hold, essentially buying a century or two to innovate past carbon. It is likely that this would result in a state of higher CO2 in the atmosphere but the costs avoided (based on linear to semi-exponential warming estimates) are tremendous
I think I'm one of the folks you think is delusional :) I agree with you that the level of the tax really matters. You can put a tax of $20/ton on CO2, and it'll raise the price of gas by about $0.20/gallon, which is nice but won't get us very far. On the other hand, you don't want to suddenly whack people with a tax that'll make gas prices go up by $4.00/gallon or something.
I think the most effective plan is to start out small but with a gradual increase every year, at a rate that is expected result in the GHG emissions cuts we want. That's something people can plan for, and that planning means people start acting on it early if they can. I like the way the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act (EICDA) does it, which is that it increases the tax by $10/ton every year, or $15/ton if we aren't hitting emissions targets.
As for what to do with the money, again I think the EICDA is a good plan -- divide it up evenly and give it back to people. This is designed to address the issue of political appeal and sustainability. I'm someone who could manage ok with the price of fossil fuels and everything that depends on them going up pretty drastically, but there are lots of people for whom that would be disastrous, and I wouldn't blame them for opposing it. Giving people a monthly dividend is a good way to ensure that a program has continued support. You end up with a competition -- if you can reduce your emissions below that of the average American, you end up ahead financially. It's a race to the bottom, in a good way.
The reason I think a carbon tax is more effective than a remediation program (or a bunch of programs), it's that this is not a problem that is easy to address directly. X is too multifaceted, because carbon emissions are intricately interwoven into most things we all do. Government programs may be able to hit the big targets -- incentivise electric cars, energy standards, etc, but just going for the big targets leaves a lot of untapped potential for emissions reductions.
I think the least painful, lowest cost way to address the problem is to make millions of small changes in addition to thousands of medium and hundreds of big changes. Until we're on all renewable energy, it can help a lot if everyone just makes some small changes. Usually "if everyone would just..." is followed by "yeah that'll never happen", but a carbon tax is how it can actually happen. It's how you get a hundred million people whose water is heated by gas (or oil, or electricity originating from coal or gas) to turn down their water heater thermostats and take shorter showers (I'm a bit skeptical of Scotts 0.1 lbs CO2 for a 10 minute shower figure btw -- water is hard to heat up). Some people won't, but enough will that it'll matter. People will take fewer flights, drive less until they get electric cars that charge with green power, swap out their last few incandescent bulbs, insulate their houses better... there are hundreds of little actions we can do with very little individual cost that will cut emissions by a lot in aggregate, *in addition* to all the big obvious ones. People that live where they get power from alternative energy won't have to make as big changes, people who get power from coal will -- and so not only will we switch to coal power plants, in addition, some people will actually decide to live where green energy is available! It won't be the main factor for most people, but it'll weigh just a bit into decisions, every day, for everyone. A carbon tax provides gentle but firm and inexorable pressure in the direction we want to go.
I think it's quite true that a revenue neutral carbon tax is the best option. It's far more politically possible and addresses the higher marginal costs to low income people with a higher marginal benefit rebate that would hopefully prevent fuel poverty
There are some special problems such as farming where a flat rebate will do nothing to match the carbon tax costs faced which would require highly adjusted taxes or highly boosted rebates but in general it's doable. The key problem I will say is that, as in BC, a promise of a revenue neutral tax isn't a guarantee at all:
I'm not coming at this from the point of view that I think I can pick logical holes in any logical argument for why a carbon tax would work. I may find the theory plausible myself, or I may not. I'm coming at it from the empirical skeptic's point of view, in the sense that I normally doubt *any* hypothesis about how 300 million people are going to react to a top-down change in the rules, e.g. a national* carbon tax.
So instead I look for precedent that can supply empirical data. Has this kind of thing ever been tried before? Did it work? Did it have unexpected side effects, as a result of political reality and/or dynamic response?
And in this case, I can find precedents, and they don't look good. Carpool lanes on the highway were supposed to strongly encourage people to...well, carpool. They didn't. Bottle deposits were supposed to radically reform the rate of recycling of bottles and cans. They might to some extent where the deposit is high enough, e.g. MI where I think it's 10 cents, but in other places they do zip, e.g. in California where it's a penny or so it doesn't change behavior at all. Cash for Clunkers was supposed to take a whole lot of polluting cars off the road that would've been kept running anyway. It didn't. And of course there have been any number of healthcare reform bills that were supposed to rein in medical cost inflation, or eliminate the problem of the un- and underinsured, and none of them have.
That doesn't mean behavior hasn't changed, and in some cases by a fair amount. Solar panel tax credits put a lot of panels on the roofs. Not nearly enough to phase out coal plants, but enough to make some noticeable changes in electricity generation, in some places. And at a cost of taxpayer subsidization of 30% (!) of the capital cost.
The common theme seems to be that you can get serious change, if you are willing to spend/transfer serious money -- but then you run the risk of bigger political issues (people notice it's just the rich owning their own homes long-term who are getting the fabulous solar deals, and the poor living in rented apartments aren't) and bigger unanticipated practical issues because the change didn't happen organically, it was imposed, e.g. California's struggle with electricity in the evening because too much of its power is locked into being generated in the afternoon when the Sun is high.
Or, on the other hand, you can make smaller feel-good measures, like the miniscule Obamacare "tax" for not being insured, or a 1 cent bottle deposit, and these don't cost as much, and don't attract as fierce political struggles, but they also don't really change behavior enough to do anything important. They're just national virtue signalling, like reducing the highway speed limit to 55 during the "Energy Crisis" of the 1970s -- which had absolutely zero long-term effect on US oil consumption.
Now maybe It Will Be Different This Time, as every social planner has said since the time of Ramses II. Maybe *this* scheme *will* change behavior enough to matter, in a way that isn't too generally disruptive, doesn't create weird new political or practical problems that weren't anticipated, won't poison the well by failing spectacularly and expensively...all possible. I'm just very, very skeptical. And I'm not basing it on any particularly critique of your argument, just sort of a "laws of thermodynamics" impression of what a nationful of people tend to do.
And that's why I said: screw the social engineering. Stop trying to read 300 million minds, predict accurately what they're all going to do, and exactly how you have to tweak their personal incentive structure to get where you want to be. Just figure out where you can spend the money to address the problem directly, and do that, using the usual mechanisms for the government acquisition of money. (As I said elsewhere I find the hypothesis that the problem can *only* be effectively addressed by individual action dubious -- I think there are lots of things that can be done at the government level that could and probably would be extremely helpful.)
The tax is the key, not the spend. Even if revenues are diverted to a swill trough (not my preference), the tax itself reduces emissions by changing the economics of carbon use.
The spend, however, may be key to whether a carbon tax ever gets enough support to become viable.
I'm aware of the theory. My opinion is that this particular theory hasn't a prayer of working in practice, but that the simpler alternate theory that a tax can usefully address externalities directly does.
For example, people visiting National Parks have an adverse impact on wildlife, which is an externality difficult to address at the individual level, since it can't easily be traced to any one person or act. Creating an admissions charge to National Parks which funds government activites can directly remediate the externality by e.g. building fences and trails to corral the people, hiring rangers to keep the people on the trails, building parking lots outside the gates and running electric busses inside the park, et cetera. And this is much more likely to be efficient and successful than hoping that you can reduce visitation sufficiently by the discouraging effect of a politically-sustainable level of admission charge.
Sure. In general you can try use tax policy to solve a problem, or you can try to use spending policy to solve a problem. If you're using spending policy, the source of the money is irrelevant to the policy. National Park wildlife could just as easily be "saved" using general tax revenues as with admission fees, but for political and ethical issues of fairness.
Which approach might work better depends on the problem. Can you spend money in a way that would massively reduce carbon emissions? Maybe, if you finance R&D of new green technologies that are cheaper, or subsidize green technologies. Either way, they work by making industrial/consumer use of green technologies the cheaper choice.
That's also what a carbon tax would do, directly and through market forces, except that you can also conveniently set the tax rate to match the external cost.
In principle, anyway. Mark Jaccard's book (The Citizen's Guide to Climate Success) convinced me that an effective carbon tax will probably never happen.
Yes, the first part is roughly what I said above: *if* you can identify spending that would effectively address the problem, you can just do that, and then *even if* your tax doesn't change behavior enough, or the way you wanted, you're still good. It's a solid conservative (i.e. cautious) approach that has multiple ways to succeed. That's why I think it makes more sense. And since I think it almost certainly *is* possible to identify government-level spending that has a decent chance of addressing the problem, that would be my policy recommendations, if ever a politician asked me for advice ha ha.
Do you have an article/book recommendation for this argument on why the taxation side of a carbon tax probably wouldn't have much benefit compared to just appropriately allocating spending on carbon reduction initiatives? It's not an intuitively obvious conclusion to me, but you seem to believe it pretty strongly it and you sound reasonable.
If the taxes are inefficiently spent they represent a loss of social value, and if the climate benefit of the tax doesn't cover that cost it is a total loss for the difference
Further augmenting this concern is that the costs of a carbon tax are relatively regressive, as a consumption tax having a greater marginal effect on the poor - people freezing or overheating to death being the most extreme costs
That question sounds really strange to me. Either carbon is bad, or it isn't, it doesn't care how much you believe or disbelieve in it. I think it's better to convince oneself to believe in things that are true, generally speaking.
Well the post is talking about environmental responsibility. I would consider it a possible outcome that a that life and consciousness could flourish more in an atmosphere with more carbon than current levels. Should not our framework for responsibility attempt to quantify "flourishing" instead?
I would say that in the year 2021, you either think that significantly more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than we have now is really bad, not bad at all or even good, or you're 9 years old and learning about this issue for the first time. In all cases, in the year 2021, unless you're planning on rolling up your sleeves yourself and becoming a climate scientist, which position you hold is probably a matter of trust. If you trust Republicans, you will think that it's maybe not bad. If you trust Democrats, you will think it's bad. You might just trust your dad and your dad told you
If you don't trust either of those two teams, another entity you could trust is the general process of science. What has happened w.r.t. the climate is somewhat interesting: a whole lot of different scientists from previously unrelated fields suddenly had something in common, because many of them made independent discoveries that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and oceans was no longer something that they could ignore, even just in the sense that it was something they had to be cognizant of in order to continue conducting research. Biologists of all kinds had to grapple with really high losses in biodiversity. Marine biologists in particular observed a common theme: increasing ocean acidification (the ocean is/was slightly basic, so it's been moving slightly towards neutral) was harmful for a bunch of marine life with particular pH sensitivities. Meteorologists know that the temperature of air and water is strongly predictive of the strength and frequency of storms like hurricanes. Agronomers, since the dust bowl, have been always trying to get better at avoiding the problems of soil erosion and nutrient depletion, and anything else that might ruin a crop season.
So even though there are a lot of wacky, religious environmentalists using climate change as their apocalypse, it just doesn't make sense that this pseudoreligion is so compelling that it captured the entire scientific establishment. Consensus is a really hard thing to build in science, especially across so many disparate fields.
So given that this is, in 2021, a matter mostly of trust, I would argue that the easiest way to convince yourself that carbon = bad is that you have a whole lot of scientists saying that it's bad for a thousand different reasons, so the probability that they're collectively all wrong is extremely low. And so the only alternative explanation that I can think of is that they're all victim to motivated reasoning via the aforementioned pseudoreligion, and I think that's a lot more fantastical than believing that humanity is capable of polluting too much.
That's all fine, I'd just rather see a prediction market in something more like flourishing than CO2 level. That way the impact of CO2 can be updated as technology and knowledge progresses, which is not something that we can calculate. Maybe there's a way to seed the oceans and massively expand flourishing, idk. My only argument is we should incentivize terminal values, not instrumental values.
A prediction market for "flourishing" would be a million times harder than a prediction market for PPM CO2. "Flourishing" isn't a terminal value, it doesn't even have terminal semantics. What you mean by flourishing and another person are different.
It's a bit like saying "The height of the Titanic is just an instrumental value. I'd prefer a model of how much the passengers will be flourishing before I decide that sinking = bad."
Obviously I'm not going to attempt to quantify "the common good" here. It's very hard but I think it's better to try than not to try. I'd rather have an explicit utilitarian framework than an implicit one.
>And so the only alternative explanation that I can think of is that they're all victim to motivated reasoning via the aforementioned pseudoreligion
Huh. To me, the obvious alternative is that everybody is afraid to speak out against the consensus, because anybody who dares to do so these days is cast out as a pariah. This, by itself, doesnt prove that the consensus is false, but if it is, there's not much chance it will be exposed as such any time soon.
Well no, frankly, this seems way more ridiculous to me. Science isn't social justice, and it isn't politics. Speaking out against the consensus is very easy to do. In fact, proving the consensus wrong is extremely highly valued. But you have to have the goods.
Like if you're in a local chapter of the Sunrise Movement, (this is a true story from a friend of mine), you might become an outcast for suggesting that "maybe we shouldn't be opposed to nuclear power" without being given a chance to present your argument. Or if you're in the Republican Party, you might be outcast for suggesting that Trump didn't actually win more votes than Joe Biden. But these are political organizations, not hundred-year-old institutions formed around uncovering truth with an honored tradition of "proving people wrong." This can even sort of be the case in social science, where sample sizes are smaller and the data is more open to interpretation. But in the hard sciences this makes no sense.
If you're a biologist, you can try to argue against the consensus that biodiversity is plummeting. Your colleagues will absolutely listen to you. You'll need to show where all the animals went, and if you don't have a convincing theory with corroborating data for why biologists everywhere are finding less biodiversity, your colleagues will probably tell you that your explanation doesn't make any sense. And if you keep on it without having persuaded anybody, yes eventually they'll kick you out of the lab group because you don't seem to have trustworthy scientific judgement. But nobody is going to immediately cast you out as a pariah for challenging the consensus.
Now you could say "sure that's how science used to work, but is no longer," but to convince anyone of that you'd have to explain why science was good at converging towards truth for hundreds of years and why and when it somehow became the Spanish Inquisition.
I think science still converges on the truth. But the rate of convergence is an interesting question, and what happens on the way is not as simple as you may be implying. In fact, it's usually not smooth. What seems to happen is that there is a dominant paradigm, and minority views are...well, not actually brutally suppressed, Inquisition style, but something that can definitely impact a career at the margin, particularly in the modern days when your livelihood depends not on some wealthy patron, with idiosyncratic ideas, or your own inherited fortune, but on sufficient praise from the community on your research grant application reviews. (Which is to say, the greatest threat today to scientific objectivity is arguably our insiders' popularity-content funding model. I don't think it's an existential threat, but it's influence is neither tiny nor entirely benign.)
The dominant paradigm then seems to stays pretty dominant, until some weird tipping point is reached, and some kind of preference cascade results in a pretty sharp switch to a new paradigm, and the cause of the switch seems only partly the accumulation of experimental data, and also partly assorted social psychological factors among H. sapiens.
There are plenty of historical examples. For example, the "mechanical/atomistic" view of matter, which was considered mental masturbation for much of the 18th and 19th centuries, clearly wrong (inasmuch as it was incompatible with irreversibility, which any idiot can see dominates macroscopic mechanics). Although I'm sure he had underlying issues of greater impact, Ludwig Boltzmann was driven (in his own mind) to suicide by the hostile reception his efforts at tackling irreversibility through an atomistic/mechanical model received. But then kind of suddenly in the last part of the 19th century, everyone accepted atoms, and a mere decade or so later you would be considered some kind of hairy uneducated untermenschen to not take the atomistic universe as gospel.
"you'd have to explain why science was good at converging towards truth for hundreds of years and why and when it somehow became the Spanish Inquisition"
I don't trust the Democrats, the Republicans, or the media to tell me what the science says.
As Andrew Revkin from the NYT's has said climate change support is a "mile wide and an inch deep". A big problem is that the media messaging gatekeepers are almost entirely made up of environmental activists at this point which results in a rather one sided storytelling exercise that borders on outright propaganda. Does anyone actually read this stuff anymore? It's become a big game of apocalypse topper. If you want to know what the "scientists say" about climate then you better read their actual words, and not what the media is telling you they are saying. Most people don't have time for this but it is astonishing how distorted most media sources have become.
This also ignores the possibility that the scientists could be correct on many aspects within their expertise and that the optimal solution for society overall is to still effectively do nothing or wait and see once economic and other perspectives are taken into account.
For example it doesn't make sense to build a 20 foot sea wall today given a 1 in 10,000 chance that it may be needed in 100 years when we can just wait and see if that type of extreme outcome starts to develop. Alternately if you are building a sea wall today that is expected to last over 50 years it would be wise to plan for 1M of sea level rise if the delta cost for that additional height is not burdensome.
I think there are some increasingly viable solutions, but what I see is what I call "blank check syndrome". If only society would believe what the scientists say then it automatically follows that any level of sacrifice and cost can be brought to bear on the problem by the same activists who amplified the problem. This is only a necessary precondition to taking action and climate activists are the very last people on earth I want tasked with fixing it.
Unfortunately the religious factions are winning, so can't ignore them. CA is in an all out war on carbon free energy. We're shutting down nuclear, shutting down hydro plants, even shutting down wind. The world bank is denying loans to 3rd world countries living on a fraction of Western energy levels.
Until there is a faction that radically distinguishes itself from the anti-human catastophisers, I cannot support the progressive position on climate at this stage.
The religious factions aren't winning, they're just really loud and Democrats like to pander to them for votes. But fortunately, these people are mostly concerned with rhetoric, not outcomes, it's relatively easy to say all the words they wanna hear but do something else. The closure of Diablo Canyon is disappointing. I do think California has a particularly strong degrowth narrative, but I think that's because you have to live in a place with a near-perfect climate to delude yourself into believing that using as little energy as possible is ideal. So I actually think degrowth is uniquely influential in California and won't scale to other places. Even here, it's still kinda fringe. Most people I know want economic growth. When you tell people that desalination plants are a thing we could build, almost everybody is excited. And I live in SF, allegedly the most progressive place in the world.
Biden is pro-nuke. There's money for nukes in his climate bill. Kamala Harris is pro-economic growth (https://twitter.com/KamalaHarris/status/1423426343199547395). Mainstream Democrat pundits like Matt Yglesias regularly call out anti-nuclear environmental groups like Sierra Club and Sunrise Movement as "fake environmental groups." (https://www.slowboring.com/p/climate-left) The IPCC is pro-nuke and pro-carbon capture.
It seems like a common quality of ideologies on the far-left to act as if everyone on the left supports your obvious position, whether it's defunding the police or degrowth. They seem to think this is persuasive, and maybe it is persuasive to, like, really anxious people and maybe they're just selecting for really anxious people. Right wing news organizations, though, take this and run with it: they also want to make the fringe look like the center because that bolsters their case that the left is crazy.
Do you mean that you want someone to make the case for you that releasing carbon into the atmosphere is bad? Or do you already buy these arguments rationally, but you still need to convince your gut that it is true?
A more interesting question is to show that your average US citizen should care about CO2 emissions, without resorting to hyperboles like "hurricane X only happened because of climate change" or "America will be overrun by climate refugees if we don't act". Personally I'm convinced that CO2 leads to higher temperatures and increases the odds of bad climate effects by a small margin, but not convinced that trying to mitigate CO2 is better than trying to mitigate the impacts of high CO2 instead.
For many of the impacts there are no mitigants (e.g. ecosystem collapse, poisoned oceans) or the costs to mitigate are way beyond costs of prevention ( depopulating area vs changing power generation)
this is why climate change is such a major issue, if the science is true there is no effective hedge on the risks and costs
Unfortunately groups previously denying climate change have now started to introduce this mitigate argument - a cynic would suggest it’s a bad faith strategy to delay meaningful government action
Or perhaps a good faith effort to avoid doing really stupid things (from their perspective) in the pursuit of solving climate change that either fail to make a difference or cause similarly bad results even if successful. Spending $10 trillion dollars in the US alone may or may not be a good idea if it's successful. Spending any non-negligible amount is a bad idea if it isn't even going to succeed.
One of the major issues I have with the options most often supported as an alternative (wind and solar) is that they are not scalable to the levels we would need to replace all carbon based power. That's doubly true for transportation, but certainly true for both residential and industrial power loads. Spending $10 trillion on getting wind and solar up to speed with current technology will fail, and be really really expensive while we're at it.
Based on current technology, it would take about 20,000 square miles of high sunlight land to power the United States with solar power. That's approaching the size of the entire state of West Virginia. That also assumes that power storage and transfer are not an issue, which of course they are significant issues.
20,000 square miles of solar panels would also be insanely resource-intensive, both in the sense of normal materials for not just the panels, but also in the form of rare earth metals and other limited resources. I'm not sure we could even find and mine enough of those materials to produce 20,000 square miles of panels, especially in the timeframe of 10-30 years many environmentalists talk about for zero emissions. That would also cover the US alone. Some countries would struggle with such a plan due to lack of sunshine and building capacity.
Wind is less land intensive, but they are also quite large and expensive. It would take well over a million wind turbines to power the US. We currently have 57,000 after quite a few years building them. Looking at places in Texas where they are widespread, I can't imagine what the world would look like with 1.2 million more of them. Again, that's just for the US.
Both of these things are difficult enough on their own, but they do not account for storage and transmission, especially to parts of the country that do not get enough wind or sunlight to make them anywhere near as economical as the ideal conditions might suggest.
You could start by walking everywhere you go, using no climate control, growing your own local food so we don't have use those pesky trucks to transport things, and so on. It might not end well if your local crop fails. You can examine the way the world was before humans started exploiting stored energy reserves and honestly ask yourself if that is the world you would prefer to live in. If so, fine. You can still choose to live that way today.
This type of question makes no sense. One has to actually examine both sides of the ledger and the side for "improvements to the human condition" is rather lengthy and compelling. Can we do this in a smarter way now that we know their are previously hidden costs? Absolutely. Are we suggesting that people in the 1700's shouldn't have exploited these reserves to make their lives better? Absolutely not.
I'm curious about companies like Climeworks (although there probably are no other companies like Climeworks). It seems like they take carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in rocks -- but isn't there some better way to use it ? I understand that sequestering carbon is the most efficient way tor reduce its concentration over time; but, on the other hand, it seems like they'd have a much higher rate of adoption if they could actually sell something useful on the output end.
It seems like they’re basically undoing the coal -> CO2 process, so there's nothing they can offer that coal can’t for much cheaper. There are environmentally friendly ways to use carbon (carbon nanotubes are something I’ve vaguely heard of) but we could also just use coal.
In order to capture the CO2 that results from burning coal, you have to install massively expensive and complicated equipment at the plant itself. In most cases, this would make the coal plant uneconomic compared to just about any other power source (including brand-new renewables), so in practice it hardly ever happens. A good case study here is the Kemper Project, which was supposed to be the first-ever coal plant built with carbon capture from the ground up; it's been under construction forever and went like 3x over budget.
There are in fact other companies like Climeworks (albeit not that many) - Google around for Direct Air Capture.
CO2 has many industrial applications (e.g. carbonation in soft drinks) and Climeworks does sell some of the CO2 it captures. The issue is that, as mentioned above, it costs Climeworks about $1000 to produce 1 ton of CO2, but the market price is about $40.
No, you are far from alone. It seems like we'll have to implement the Butlerian Jihad against leaf blowers without Scott's help. Stay strong, brother !
You aren't kidding. Working from home during the pandemic, I was subjected to the sound of all my neighbors' lawn-mowing, leaf-blowing, hedge-trimming, and weed-whacking activities. Some days it sounded like there was frickin' dirt bike rally going on down the block.
Not sure if I'm completely convinced about my reasoning here, but I think conditional on the fact you are relatively bright, relatively well of, and care about this stuff, and conditional on it mattering, having one extra child might will actually have a negative carbon impact.
Someone has to invent the technologies that will reduce global carbon output, and I think my child is disproportionately likely to be that someone (obviously very unlikely in absolute terms, but still potentially positive in expectation)
It's possible that the type of person who decides not to have a child primarily for environmental reasons would have kids with expected negative net carbon impact, yes. However, not having a child (and e.g. choosing to adopt) is also a valuable social signal that might help them persuade others to take climate change more seriously, so the total calculation seems like it could go either way.
Also, I'm not so sure I would want to be the child of a parent who was on the fence about having me, but decided to because I was in expectation net negative carbon. That'd feel especially bad in the context of the expected offset being ~$1k.
Is there enough time left to raise a child, educate them as a scientist, and wait for them to invent something? I've recently been hearing environmentalists saying we need to cut emissions in half by 2030 and to net-zero by 2050, or something along those lines. I'm not sure how exactly they arrive at those dates, but they give me the impression that if you wanted to fix the problem by having kids and training them to fix it for you, you should have started on that before now.
That's one of the frustrations that I, and many others, have had about dates supplied by environmentalists. They are always about 10 years away, with catastrophe closer to 30 years. I'm old enough to have heard the same 10 and even 30 year predictions 30 years ago. That doesn't mean that we should go ahead and pollute and destroy the world, but it does mean that it's very very difficult to make any meaningful long term plans and also difficult to take further predictions seriously.
It's like a "prophet" predicting the return of Jesus eight different times, and so far all of them are wrong. Who would continue listening to that prophet? How many people, upon hearing that the prediction was wrong, would begin to doubt the underlying concern at all?
My experience over the past 10 years has been of seeing predictions fulfilled. I don’t have anything rigorous, but my memory of climate change predictions 10 years ago for 2020 was that they were for a slightly warmer climate and increase in frequency of extreme weather events, which sounds about right to me. I think a lot of what people focused on for 2020 was if we hadn’t started making progress by then it would increase the necessary speed of change to avoid catastrophe in 2050 and 2100, which I think are the years I’ve seen predictions of sea level rise for my whole life.
I remember a lot of talk about how the new records hit on multiple years around 2010 were just the result of "the pause" and then random noise added on it.
Looking back, that was pretty wrong.
I've seen most of the scientific arguments against warming fail, even some I used to make. The *methods* argued for mitigation may be wrong (nuclear power, please!) and the advocates may be chicken-littles who scream too much, but my money is way into the camp of it being true, and now we need to deal with it in the right way.
You may even be able to argue this for people who are not well off, or even all that bright or climate-conscious (though if that's the case you're not considering this to begin with). The problem is we can't quantify the likelihood of a given baby eventually contributing to these solutions; but I'd expect it to increase with the total number (or percentage) of future educated people.
It's not even necessary that they invent carbon-reducing technology themselves for having a child to have a positive carbon impact. They can contribute to the invention and production of carbon-reducing technology indirectly -- for example, by teaching people who work on it, or even just by positively contributing to the economy, freeing up other people to work on the technology.
Came to make a similar point; if you are someone who really cares about these things (vegetarian, use renewable energy, rarely fly/drive, etc etc) the carbon impact of your child will be much lower than the average (and we know that individuals' impacts can vary dramatically even within a first world lifestyle context, see e.g. Sweden and USA).
On a fuzzier point, ceding the long term culture to those who don't think the future is important seems like a long term losing proposition...
Even within this framework, the "one less child number" makes zero sense.
Forget the child has a child has a child, let's just treat the child as one additional human.
If just the meat a human consumes counts as 3000lb/yr, then how can *everything* an additional human consumes count as less?
The argument seems to be something like "while that child is 4 yrs old, this is how much additional carbon it adds". And while I'm willing to stipulate, for the sake of argument (though I think it's a bad argument) that we won't consider the indefinite future progeny of our child, I'm not willing to stipulate that we pretend it will stay at the consumption level of a 4yr old forever.
I saw that. I'm just saying it makes no sense. Even if you don't want to track the cost of the future children, the calculation is for the cost of a CHILD, as though we're all going to pretend that children never grow up and become adults.
I do not consider this a reasonable good faith estimate.
I thought the fairest way to do this was to give the carbon cost for an actual child, but as I said in section 25, by the time the child is older, overall carbon use will probably be much lower, and the cost of offsets per ton will be much lower, to the point where I think these numbers are still somewhere in the ballpark of correct even then.
I guess that's where we differ, in the strength of our convictions as to those future carbon numbers being "much lower".
I've been hearing that story for 30 yrs now. They have fallen, yes. Have they fallen enough to invalidate my point? Not if we had done the calculation 30 or 20 yrs ago.
Is the reason for name99's sniff test failing that you're amortizing 20 years of a child over 80 years of one's life? I think you imply that in the footnote? Not totally unreasonable, but at least unintuitive. "switch to a Tesla" is per year of Tesla ownership, not the Tesla benefit over the lifetime of the Tesla spread out over the owners whole life (which would reduce it).
I don't think the right strategy is totally obvious, but I'm not sure I'm a fan of yours? When I see "have one fewer child" I think I assume total child lifespan divided by my lifespan. Keeping that denominator but switching the numerator to "while the child is still at home" is a bit confusing.
I think a more rational way to do this is to look at population growth. If population is shrinking, you won't add CO2 to the current status quo by having an extra child. But once population is growing, assume you are adding the average CO2 usage over a persons life to the equation.
Only issue with this is that in 30 years the average adult might use far less CO2 due to new technologies. So this seems very hard to estimate.
If I'm reading this correctly, it would cost somewhere between $540M and $36B every year to offset carbon output for the world. Thats somewhere between 0.6% and 45% of world GDP annually to maintain the status quo. Feels like that is an unsustainable practice, both in terms of total investment and running out of space to plant trees. Isn't reducing overall carbon output a higher ROI?
It's ~$500 billion to $36 trillion dollars (I think you're missing three orders of magnitude). But that's just the current marginal cost of offsetting multiplied by the total carbon, and, as he says, the cost only scales so far, so it's not really representative of the total cost to actually solve the problem in its entirety.
I think you're missing a block of zeroes - it's between $540B and $36T (although you got the percent GDP right).
I think there are a few roles for offsetting (although I wouldn't want to have to offset the entire world economy):
- Even if we stopped emitting carbon tomorrow, a lot of existing carbon would stay in the atmosphere and keep temperatures high. We need to do something about it.
- Even if you and your country stopped emitting carbon tomorrow, lots of other people and countries probably wouldn't, and sometimes (eg the developing world) it might seem kind of unfair to force them. We might need developed countries to address somewhat more than 100% of the carbon they're currently emitting, which can't be done without offsets.
- Realistically we can't scale either reduced-emissions OR offsets up fast enough to prevent disaster, and we'll have to work with both. I would love to have the option to put global warming 100% on hold and tread water for just 0.6% of world GDP per year, it would give us a lot more time to do the other stuff (I don't think offsets will ever be anywhere near this level, but I would still love it).
I'm a huge fan of this kind of information, even if it's partly speculative--thank you!
I've recently decided that climate change is the issue I want my donation budget to go to, but have been unsure where to go from there, because the place I used to go for guidance about where to donate (GiveWell) doesn't have any recommended charities for climate change. So I was glad to get a few recommendations for organizations to donate to. I'm very much looking forward to future posts on climate change stuff!
Tbh I'm commenting primarily to say that I'm a big fan of your profile pic ;)
but I am also curious as to why you've decided to direct your money to work on climate change. Were there any people/activists/books/studies in particular that have moved you to do so?
I can't point to any sources that convinced me, unfortunately; I'm not sure what changed my thinking. The people I trusted to guide me before (see: GiveWell) argue against me here--mainly because they aren't very hopeful that any one individual's donations can do much good.
I'm just convinced that the negative effects of climate change will be significantly bad for human beings. And look, if a species goes (actually) extinct, it's extinct forever. If an ecosystem loses enough of its keystone species to cease to function, those ecosystems are gone forever, so that even if we could reverse kinds of damage later on, you'd still be left with a permanently (within a human time-scale) ecologically impoverished planet.
Given the long-term time scale of the problems caused by climate change, I'd rather devote what little I have to that than to solving short-term problems involving a bunch of humans suffering and dying right now, as much as I do also worry about the humans suffering and dying right now. I'm just a lot more worried about the fact that we're screwing up the world that *all* future humans will have to live in. All is a lot.
I've been researching this issue myself - there are two sources which seem to repeatedly come up when it comes to Effective Altruism-style evaluations of climate charities:
Both agree that the Coalition for Rainforest Nations and the Clean Air Task Force are among the most effective, although there are several other options.
I haven't looked in to these charities myself, but RC Forward has identified some more climate change organizations (Carbon180, Cool Earth, TerraPraxis - https://rcforward.org/donate/#environmental) that meet at least one of these criteria, according to RC Forward:
"""
The charity currently is or recently was recommended by a well-respected, unbiased, evidence-based charity evaluator, for example GiveWell or Animal Charity Evaluators.
The charity has been identified by a third-party expert in the charitable sector as implementing extremely cost-effective interventions in its particular cause area.
The charity is itself a well-respected, evidence-based charity evaluator or incubator.
The charity serves to educate and build a community around concepts like high-impact and cost-effective charity.
The charity’s intervention is as of yet unproven, though evidence reviewed by the experts mentioned above suggests the intervention is especially promising.
I think CoolEarth used to be more recommended in the effective altruism community, and then it seemed to fade away in the discourse. I don't recall if there's any particular reason why.
> This post tries to quantify how much carbon is produced by various activities, lifestyle changes, and actors.
The answer to this is really simple. Unless you are talking about technologies not yet invented involving nuclear fusion and similar, the answer is simple: not one of them produces carbon.
Yes, I'm a nerd, and very fond of precision. Carbon dioxide is not the same thing as carbon, and when I read discussion of greenhouse gas emissions that carelessly conflate the two, my reaction is not to expect precision anywhere else. At the very least, the only greenhouse gas acknowledged will be "carbon", and the only unfortunate side effect of releasing carbon dioxide acknowledged will be its role as a greenhouse gas.
You, Scott, almost certainly know better. (Your professional qualifications pretty much require you to have passed college chemistry.) I'm not sure whether you are trying to write in a simple form for the generally clueless - not your usual practice - or what. Indeed, your table correctly says "LBs CO2" rather than referring to "carbon". Maybe you are trying to signal what you say explicitly a little later:
> I can’t stress enough how approximate and unreliable these numbers are. The reason I made this chart and other people didn’t isn’t because I’m smarter or harder-working than they are. It’s because I’m less responsible, and more willing to use numbers that are kind of grounded in wild guesses, and technically shouldn’t be compared to each other.
Nonetheless, I wish you'd be a bit more careful, rather than giving the impression you aren't competent to understand the sources you cite.
Probably doesn't hurt to be more precise, but I think "carbon" actually might be better if understood as "carbon species", because CO2 isn't the only greenhouse gas we care about. Other gasses tend to be converted to equivalent CO2, as Scott discusses, but not specifically saying "CO2" is more accurate, even if less precise (as long as it isn't interpreted as pure carbon, which doesn't seem like a necessary interpretation).
But see, he's actually the best at being no fun, and if we actually want to do something useful to slow climate change, we are necessarily on Team No Fun. Giving up fun things is part of what's actually necessary to reduce the absolute quantity of greenhouse gas emissions. Harleys are fun. Flying to Cancun is fun. I tried an Impossible Burger the other day for the first time. It was more expensive and less tasty than a regular hamburger. Capitalism is happy to offer the Impossible Burger to guilt-ridden liberals but woe betide you if you try to take the regular hamburger away.
Maybe going the other direction is a better plan - make elk burgers and bison burgers The burger to enjoy, more expensive but potentially more tasty, and develop some social cachet such that one elk burger has enough glow to last three months. Get everybody going to the Cabela's cafe. Those bison jerky granola bar things are even for sale in *gas stations* now - it is mainstreaming.
Counter-pedantry: "Produced" doesn't just mean "created." If those activities cause more carbon to be brought forth and released into the atmosphere it's reasonable to say that they produce that carbon, even if the carbon existed in some form beforehand.
Huh. I guess iron mines don’t produce iron... whooaaaa ... and desalination plants don’t produce water? And businesses don’t produce money ...
Produce, in economics, refers to either providing or transforming into some usable form. Not chemical synthesis. This isn’t even pedantry it’s just wrong. Just not what the term means in the relevant field.
I think it comes from thinking about the carbon cycle by ecologists, because the carbon atoms go all over the place, but they're only present as CO2 molecules in the atmosphere. For example, only the C in the "CO2" emitted by fossil fuel combustion is new to the atmosphere, the two O atoms came from the atmosphere in the first place. Similarly, when "CO2" is removed from the atmosphere by green plants, roughly speaking only the C atom and one O atom is removed, the other O atom returns immediately as water. There's a bunch of H atoms that shuffled around, too.
If you are going to be pedantic, you could at least be criticizing the table for saying CO2 rather than CO2e, which is what is actually shown for many of the items, per the notes.
In any case, when things such as sequestration are considered (see Amazon (the Rainforest) on the table), we are considering Carbon, C, and converting it to assumed sequestered CO2.
Overall, you comment doesn't make you come off as a 'nerd' (at least in this domain) or fond of precision.
For Australians in the comments, I recommend GreenFleet for carbon offsets. I looked into their annual reports, back calculated how much carbon is locked up in a tree etc. and it seemed pretty legit to me. After this investigation, an environmental economist I know (who worked on the Daintree rainforest reclamation scheme) confirmed that he had been using the service for years. I’ve personally offset 10 years of my family’s emissions, planning to do another 10 years come tax time. Costs are good ($15/t AUD) and it’s easy. The basic practice is re-foresting workable, but marginally productive agricultural land (hobby farms mostly used for low profit livestock).
I personally struggle a bit with the non-tangible side of donating to political change charities, so was very happy to find this option. Also, i apologise for how much of an ad this seems like, I promise I’m not affiliated in any way.
Mowing a half-acre lot with a push mower every summer Saturday as a teenager will fix that unit in your mind pretty well. Incidentally, not a chore that's amenable to electrification. It's hard to finish all of my considerably smaller yard on 10 Ah worth of lithium-ion batteries, though an electric mower is much more pleasant to use and I don't mind breaking the chore up into two parts. The energy density of fossil fuels is just too goddamn useful for our own good.
Those batteries keep getting better. I saw a lot of battery powered snowblowers in my neighborhood last winter. The batteries seem to hold up surprisingly well. My neighbor is a construction carpenter and uses his on three lots with a single charge.
Speaking as a former powertrain software engineer in the auto industry, I found it really interesting to see how much less polluting per fuel consumption my V8 full size truck was vs my older, tiny commuter car for going to and from work. The commuter car is very close to 2/5 the size of the truck in engine displacement and pollutes more like 1/2 as much per mile. Now, in my case, the truck was in fact purchased to move things heavier than any car could move, so it wasn't a thing that could be replaced with a significantly less polluting vehicle. Additionally, I find it interesting that we don't actually discuss the fact that modern turbocharged engines have significantly higher particulate emissions (much worse for health) to reduce carbon emissions.
I don't understand this. What's the mileage you get per gallon of gas for the V8 truck vs. commuter car? Surely the truck has to be less fuel-efficient than the car purely by virtue of the difference in weight.
My immediate reaction given what you've described is to say that you've just provided a neat example of Jevons paradox, where efficiency gains in producing a given good through improvements in technology lead to increased consumption of the good. In the aggregate, the very impressive gains by the automotive industry in using a gallon of gasoline more efficiently over the past 40 years have been at least partially offset by a shift in the composition of the American fleet toward larger vehicles. I don't begrudge you the truck if you need a truck, but it's just this sort of dynamic in consumer behavior that makes collective action problems a real pisser and leads me to be skeptical of technological solutions to climate change.
The car gets like 27mpg combined, the truck like 17mpg combined as measured in real use and the EPA estimated carbon per mile is much worse than that comparison would suggest.
Most of the difference there comes from catalytic converter improvements in terms of the difference between carbon emissions, since both are new enough to operate at pretty reliable stoichiometry. I think the real difference would be between the 2.7L turbo F150's fuel consumption and an older, less efficient large sedan, since I've seen people go from one to the other when buying a new car.
I would actually argue that the regulatory requirements for safety features and fuel economy/emissions have driven the cost of a vehicle up to the point that people are often preferring to keep older, less efficient/more polluting vehicles on the road out of affordability concerns, often causing more pollution on miles driven, though likely not on total cost since new builds cause a lot of emissions during production. Still, we're not likely at a local or global optimum on that pareto chart.
We'd do much better in America to switch to the European model of "liters to go 100km" model. But for us I guess it would be "gallons to go 100 miles."
It makes clear that there are some really important reasons to go from 15mpg to 25mpg when you instead see it as "6.7" going down to "4.0".
Once you hit 4 gallons-to-go-100-miles, the marginal improvements become much harder. 40mpg to 50 mpg sounds impressive, but expressed as going just from "2.5" to "2.0" and you can realize it's just saving 50 total gallons of gas a year, and you can probably save that carbon elsewhere much easier.
We'd do best to get just the *worst* things off the road, and then worry about something else instead.
I'm old-fashioned enough that I'm still much more concerned about smog/particulates than I am about CO2. But I live in a place (Utah) where the air quality suffers a great deal just due to atmospheric effects: we're downwind from California, so fires/smog float this way, and we're in a basin prone to inversions much of the year, so smog accumulates.
I'm mildly skeptical about CO2 and climate change. I know, I know. I think more CO2 dumped in the atmosphere can indeed make the planet warmer, but I don't think our understanding of the climate is all that good, and I don't think the conclusions made from climate prognostications about what is to be done are all that wise. But I've got no skepticism at all about particulate pollution. It's definitely bad, and I'm glad we've taken action to make it better.
There's more to do, of course. Electrification of a lot of our transport will help a lot, and it ought to make everyone happier about the atmosphere in the long run.
Electrification is surprisingly less effective than you might think -- much of the particulate emissions from vehicles comes from tires and brakes ablating and there's good arguments that the overall higher average weight of an EV does more ablation at least in tires than you save from regenerative braking. Moral of the story being that everything has a tradeoff and it's not always clear that the regulatory bright line is anywhere near the optimum.
The Eeyore's who work in Air Quality are some of the worst people I've had to spend time with.
"...and so we achieve a net reduction of CO2 as well as substantial reductions in NOx, combined with a redistribution of emissions to areas of lower population density"
AQ Eeyore: "But the PM 2.5s and PM10s might get a bit worse, so maybe we should just do nothing"
I've found it to be the whole 'benefit-cost analysis missing from mental models' thing, across a substantial segment of a profession.
I know this is more complex than what you're going for but... I cringe when I see gas plants represented (and other gas-heavy activities) represented just in terms of CO2 and not accounting for methane emissions. Gas often gets misrepresented as cleaner than it really is and it's not good for the whole climate discourse.
The most important thing is to realize that we probably need to get to net negative, not net zero.
This means scaling carbon removal (direct air capture etc) to reduce the cost/unit from 100s - 1000s $/ton to 10 - 100 $/ton, where carbon seems to be priced, if it is priced at all.
Order of magnitude decreases in unit cost is something something China is (uniquely) good at, so the most effective thing is probably high carbon prices that create an incentive to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and (sneakily) let China steal IP of existing direct air capture devices to kickstart the manufacturing of carbon pullers at world scale.
I think that calculating those indirect effects is generally problematic, because we have no way of knowing what would have happened to the carbon released in their production and transport if the chopsticks in question had not been produced. I'm guessing that most of it would have been released anyway, so that those effects are negligible compared to the carbon captured in the wood, but that's just my guess.
I don't think that planting trees or the Amazon rainforest really acts as a carbon sink, at least in the sense of removing some amount of CO2 from the atmosphere every year. To take carbon from the air, it has to be converted to some other state and stored. In the case of a forest, it's in the form of plant material (wood, etc). But forests can only grow so large, and then the decaying (or burning) plants release all the stored carbon back into the air. The only carbon that is more permanently removed must be sequestered like with fossil fuels, but this process takes millions of years (and might not even occur at all with modern microorganisms), so the amount per year is insignificant.
If the Amazon is actively locking in more carbon right now, it's just because the fires cleared out prime growing space and now the trees can grow back to fill that space, which brings it back to the same carbon storage level as before. But over the natural cycle of burning and regrowth, everything probably ends up around equal. There's temporary benefits to planting trees but I'm not sure it's really significant on a global scale, especially when planted in places that may be cleared or burned again in the near future.
It might actually be more of a sustainable carbon sink to continuously harvest forests and sequester the wood, allowing new forest growth to occur. Building houses seems to keep the wood intact for at least a few decades. Turning the wood to charcoal (and storing instead of burning the charcoal) would be more permanent.
Peat bogs actually do remove some amount of co2 per year from air, and correspondingly do in mass yearly. But forests don’t seem to, and a bunch of news headlines (reliable science journalism!!) claim that the Amazon isn’t sinking much carbon.
It seems to me that a forest, left to its own devices, wouldn't produce or remove much in the way of CO2 on net. But destroying the forest produces CO2 and letting it grow back consumes CO2. We want more wood to exist, because whatever carbon is in the wood isn't in the air.
Most forests have trees with capacity to grow larger and many forests can accumulate carbon in soil - but right now trees are cut down before reaching full size
And anyway increasing forest area would lock some carbon.
> I don't think that planting trees or the Amazon rainforest really acts as a carbon sink, at least in the sense of removing some amount of CO2 from the atmosphere every year.
It will as long as trees are getting bigger. Not sure how long trees need to grow to reach stable state in Amazon rainforest.
AFAIK Amazon rainforest is pretty bad at accumulating humus in soil, but still I expect trees to be growing at least for several years.
I think my point is that the release of CO2 comes from taking fossil fuels and burning them, and growing trees does not really offset this because a tree is not the equivalent of a fossil fuel. Trees take valuable land and can be burnt easily through wildfires, and it doesn't scale to create more forests indefinitely. It becomes more expensive the more forests that you have, because suitable land runs out.
For it to really be an equivalent offset, you would need to do the opposite of burning fossil fuels, which is to turn carbon back into fuel and bury it, by burying wood or charcoal for instance. You can't really cancel out your carbon emissions that come from burning fossils fuel just by saving forests, that's just kicking the can down the road a bit.
> It becomes more expensive the more forests that you have, because suitable land runs out.
Yes, in other words multiplying current offset price by total emissions is not a good way to calculate total costs to mitigate emissions. But right now it is fairly effective.
> growing trees does not really offset this because a tree is not the equivalent of a fossil fuel
But growing forest and keeping it indefinitely is. Note that growing forests is a good idea anyway (erosion, flooding control) and it is possible to extract steady stream of resources from a grown forest without destroying ut.
Having more forest is certainly better than nothing, but I would guess it's just a tiny fraction compared to the burning of fossil fuels, and even if we covered every possible part of the planet with as much forest as we could, it wouldn't make up for the burning of fossil fuels that we do, because that comes from millions of years of plants.
And, purely looking at the carbon capture instead of the other benefits, I would suspect that trying to systematically harvest the wood and sequester it would capture more carbon than simply keeping a forest indefinitely. We should also leave plenty of natural forests for the other benefits, but if we want to be serious about CO2, we should analyze any potential solutions properly.
1) "even if we covered every possible part of the planet" - yes, but it is not a valid reason to ignore that we can plant forest on massive scale, benefit from it anyway and capture some CO2
2) "more carbon than simply keeping a forest indefinitely" - to do this one needs to have a mature forest in the first place, so it is not in any way opposed (and typical forest will be used to produce wooden products, many of them locking C02 for decades and being an alternative to plastics etc)
OK, it doesn't sound like we're really disagreeing that much. Just that here in California, we let the forests grow a lot, and now they say the forests are too thick so they burn like crazy, releasing all that carbon back into the air. I think we should focus more on logging and tree burial rather than leaving them untouched.
Planting new forests also means denying people potential farmland and living space, which is a really difficult sell. I think forests are just a small part of the solution. And people really shouldn't think that saving forests absolves them of their fossil fuel use.
So, sequestering carbon as wood -- whether that's in structures or just buried deep underground -- implies also sequestering the other elements that make up wood. Is there enough bio-available phosphorus in the world for wood to become the major storage form of the carbon we'd prefer not be in the atmosphere or ocean.
Quanta is usually good for the areas I'm familiar with so I'm inclined to trust them on this. If they're right then this is a serious problem for climate models.
And hilariously my misunderstanding of what "humus" means resulted - by accident - in having view matching reality. I was not expecting inactive carbon bing stored in soil for centuries.
Actually I believe even mature forests are net carbon sinks, for two reasons: leaf and twig litter falls to the ground, and depending significantly on the climatic zone, over time builds a very thick layer of soil enriched with organic compounds. In temperate zones this layer can reach tens or even hundreds of meters thick -- we might think of it as a sort of proto-peat -- if it were buried by vulcanism, it might form a layer of coal over 100 million years. Secondly, and relatedly, the tree rootlets interact in subtle ways with bacteria and other tiny organisms in the soil, sending out sugars (made by photosynthesis) that the bacteria eat and convert to their own biomass. The bacteria die and decay and also form part of the organic component of the forest soil.
This is true over the timescale of millions of years, but in the next century that we're concerned with, then I doubt that the total contribution is significant. Though we certainly shouldn't be burning any sort of giant peat layer that we don't need to be touching.
I believe that decomposition generally involves the carbon from plant material being converted to CO2, almost entirely. Left naturally, only a small amount will avoid decomposition and be sequestered into the Earth. Bacteria are usually generating CO2 as they consume the plant matter, as the ones doing most of the decomposition.
If we bury the logs ourselves, we can cause a much larger amount of the plant matter to avoid decomposition. Though we'd have to find a way to do this that is sustainable too.
Actually, no, the sequestration has been measured, and it is quite significant[1]. No, the decomposition of most of the plant matter a tree produces over its lifetime (which are the zillions of leaves it makes every year and then discards) does not immediately return to the atmosphere. This is easily demonstrated! Go into any old growth forest and start digging. Stop when you hit bedrock, or a purely inorganic layer, e.g. a layer of clay. But bring a lunch, you'll be there a while. What you're seeing is essentially the way coal formed in the first place 300 million years ago. It's not a lot per acre -- but there are a lot of acres of forest.
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[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature07276 Note the estimate in the abstract that old-growth forests sequester 1.3 Gt of carbon/year. US CO2 emissions are estimated by the EPA to be about 6.5 Gt/year, so this is hardly an insignificant amount.
I can't say for sure which sources are the most accurate. I don't think your example is particularly valid because digging in an old growth forest would be potentially digging through millions of years of accumulated forest matter. To measure how much carbon is sequestered per year, you'd have to instead see how much that mass actually increases over a year, which would probably be rather difficult to accurately measure. Though you can also consider that if X tons of carbon are sequestered every year, then after millions of years there would be X * million tons. Aside from underground fires or other destructive things I suppose.
After you spend 30 seconds googling you should spend another few minutes reading the actual paper. Then you'd find this:
"The climate mitigation effect of unmanaged forests with trees more than 200 years old is estimated to be at least one-third too high."
One-third too high doesn't change my argument in any important way, and it certainly does not lead to the *opposite* conclusion. It's a footnote, at most.
No, you would not be digging through millions of years of forest. Come on. There isn't a forest on the planet that's a *million* years old. At best a few thousand. If nothing else the Laurentide ice sheet only retreated from the temperate zones like 20,000 years ago or so.
The full quote is a bit less charitable: "The climate mitigation effect of unmanaged forests with trees more than 200 years old is estimated to be at least one-third too high -- and is based solely upon their own data, which, incidentally, is subject to great uncertainty. Thus, the basis for the article's conclusions is very problematic,"
And in the conclusion: "Old-growth forest plays a key role in biodiversity. However, from a long-term climate mitigation perspective, it isn't an effective tool. Grasping the nuance is important so that debate can be based upon scientifically substantiated assertions, and so that policy is not influenced on an incorrect basis."
I don't think it's inaccurate to say that the source claims the opposite: old growth forests do not sequester enough carbon to significantly help mitigate climate change.
Another 30 seconds googling shows some forests may be that old, but that's irrelevant. Even if the forest dies out, the buried material would mostly remain, and then eventually a new forest would appear above it. There have definitely been forests for millions of years, regardless of whether there's an unbroken line up until now.
I don't feel like you're arguing in particularly good faith so I don't have much interest in continuing to discuss things with you if you continue in the same style.
There needs to be a lot more discussion about the BENEFITS of global warming and the possibility that it could be a net GOOD.
Broke: Global warming hoax! Muh hockey stick graph! Georgia Guidestones prove the elites want you dead!!!
Woke: Climate emergency! Storms of muh grandchildren!
Bespoke: Global warming is real and is a near unalloyed good, increasing agricultural productivity through the fertilization effect, reducing droughts (a warmer planet is a wetter planet), and opening up trade routes & new resources. A planet that is 2-3C warmer will literally produce more food and be able to support a larger population.
Also as a starting point, any time you take an incredibly complex system with lots of interacting processes and feedback loops massively altering one element very suddenly is unlikely to come to helpful
Depends on what kinds of externalities there are. If most costs are internalized, it's fine. And we have to permit pecunariary externalities to get anything done. But I was literally running around and breaking all of your stuff, that would understandably be considered a bad thing.
It rained in Greenland a few days ago. You know how when the temperature has been hanging around freezing for a week or two and the snow's melted and refrozen over the sidewalks a few times? The best thing to clear it out is a good rain when the temperature gets up to about 40 degrees because water has several times the heat capacity of air.
In the next thousand or so years we probably would want to deliberately heat the planet up a bit (or if the effect can be localized, warm up Siberia while perhaps cooling the equatorial Africa, say) because a lot of the planet is indeed cooler than what's optimal for human flourishing.
The problem is people, infrastructure and farms have been concentrated on areas that are broadly speaking optimal RIGHT NOW, and an increase in global temperatures makes most extant farms and extant people and extant infrastructure sorely misplaced (the same could be said about distribution of other species: areas that are tundra right now could be a host of much greater abundance of life in a warmer planet, but it takes time for plants and animals to migrate). They can relocate for sure, but since most of the warming is poised to happen during time span of decades and a few centuries, the short-term cost to society (either from enduring newly suboptimal climates or the costs of moving) is quite immense. Take for instance the areas currently irrigated by meltwater from Himalayan glaciers: that's the source of food for some 1.5B people and rather than packing up and leaving for greener pastures, it's not too unlikely nukes start flying as three nuclear-armed nations of the area start fighting over water use of the diminishing great rivers so vital to their populations.
There's a trillion dollar industry already trying to convince people that climate change isn't so bad. It's not exactly an unheard of position. Just a bad one
It's not. While there are some benefits - in some cases CO2 will enhance growing (although more frequently other limiting factors matter more), and unsurprisingly fewer people will freeze to death - the net result is overwhelmingly bad.
>Elevated CO2 generally causes reductions in stomatal density, stomatal conductance, leaf transpiration, and canopy/ecosystem evapotranspiration. (citations omitted)
>Net primary productivity (NPP) might positively respond to the carbon fertilization effect. Although, evidence shows that enhanced rates of photosynthesis in plants due to CO2 fertilization do not directly enhance all plant growth, and thus carbon storage.
I came to the comment to recommend this book, and want to third the recommendation! And agree that it's remarkably readable for what it basically a list of items/activities and explanation of their carbon costs.
I’m not a fan of this is kind of analysis. What can one do with it? Adding up the discrete micro changes one might come to the conclusion that the cost of reducing CO is just not worth it.
We need an incentive working through the price system for decades to make everything just enough more or less expensive to produce really big changes. Personally, I suspect that fission energy could become cheap enough to power CO2 capture so than many fossil fuel combusting activities can continue. But who knows. Maybe best set of technologies win.
Funnily enough, I don't think it's quite coherent to care both about environmental disaster (and ensuing civilizational collapse) and rogue superintelligence: the first would prevent the second!
If I think both have a 50% likelihood of happening, I want to do whatever I can to increase that 25% chance of survival. That’s probably caring about both, but it might be putting all your energy into one or the other.
Ah, but only AI is the lethal threat here. Civilizational collapse would be nasty, but I'm pretty sure humanity can tank it and bounce back, eventually.
If I have a 10% chance of dying from overheating and a 20% chance of dying from cold, the fact that of the two Co occurred it would cancel out doesn't negate the risks
No, in context, "you" means "life on the planet", not any individual. That is what I am highlighting in the OP, and I assume LondonPsychThrowaway was maintaining the frame.
And it's rather implausible to expect environmental disaster to end humanity, much less all life.
Further complicating the Bitcoin issue, I would say a better way to value a Bitcoin transaction is to ask how much the individual is willing to pay to make it, in other words, what is the transaction fee they pay? Due to the existence of bitcoin issuance in block rewards, transaction fees only make up about 10% of the total block reward over the past year (but fluctuating wildly, see https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html#3y). So perhaps the value given for Bitcoin should be 10x smaller.
Eating a cheeseburger is the equivalent of driving a normal car about 14 miles.
Walking 14 miles would burn more calories than a cheeseburger. Google says 100 calories per mile, so 14 miles = 1400 calories. That's maybe three cheeseburgers. So walking costs 3 times more carbon than driving.
Cycling seems to burn about half the calories of walking. So cycling costs 2 times more carbon than driving.
That's by distance. By time is different. If you cycle at 1/4 the speed you drive, then cycling costs only half the carbon of driving on a per minute basis.
Assuming a motorcycle costs only half the carbon of a car, motorcycling for a minute and riding a bicycle for a minute are equivalent.
But cycling for a mile is FOUR TIMES the carbon of motorcycling for that same mile!
Remember that Hyundai commercial a few years back where they were so proud everything in the commercial was done by human power (IIRC, they had a guy on a stationary bicycle producing energy to move a backdrop to simulate the car moving)? They probably produced several times as much carbon as if they just let the machines do it.
Of course, if you get your calories from beans rather than meat, it might be less carbon. The chart doesn't say.
I came to the comments specifically to see if anyone would bring this up. I wonder about this very thing every time riding a bike or taking the stairs is mentioned as a CO2 reducer.
Certainly having to ride a bike will make you travel shorter distances. And perhaps you were going to get equivalent exercise of some form regardless, so might as well make it useful. But putting cost(bike)=0 is probably too simple.
Do people in NYC eat more because of all the walking?
1) have you checked in-city commuting emissions? Fuel use is vastly higher per distance in traffic jams
2) bicycle infrastructure (vehicle, roads vs cycleways, parkings) is vastly cheaper, also in C02 equivalent
3) travel by bicycle heavily encourages limiting distance.
4) exercise via bicycle replaces other exercise (say at gym) that would consume similar amount of calories
5) exercise via bicycle increases health (what reduces needs for costly, also in Co2-equivalent medical interventions). And ironically increases C02 emissions via longer life.
The underlying assumption here is that people who do more exercise eat more calories as a result.
This might be true at the upper extreme, in that professional or other full time sportspeople do eat a lot more calories than people with sedentary jobs.
But the linkage between diet and exercise for regular people is much less robust. It may even be negatively correlated (people trying to lose weight eat less and exercise more, when they give up, they give up on both; I'm not claiming this is causal).
If it doesn't result in more calories of food being consumed, then the calculus is very different. And the linkages between food and exercise are much more complicated than the simplistic calories in, calories out analyses suggest.
"Walking 14 miles would burn more calories than a cheeseburger. Google says 100 calories per mile, so 14 miles = 1400 calories. That's maybe three cheeseburgers. So walking costs 3 times more carbon than driving."
Under the assumption that the person subsists entirely on cheeseburgers. This is a bad idea for more than climate reasons.
(Disclaimer: It’s hard to tell whether you’re being serious or just having fun playing Devil’s advocate, but I’m going to assume the former.)
Obviously there are far more efficient ways of feeding yourself than burgers that allow walking to easily surpass cars in carbon efficiency. Walking will also improve your health (provided a car driver doesn’t maim you), which is a nice positive externality that you might have sought out anyway. And if you do it often, you will quickly beat Google’s estimate and find that you can walk 14 miles without requiring any more food at all (that is, you get fit).
And cycling is probably an order of magnitude more efficient than either.
Um, surely even getting fit doesn't stop you from using energy in order to walk? I would buy something like "getting fit means you're a more efficient walker and need less energy (because less of it is wasted)" but would be surprised if it was by more than a factor of 2. If anything, at the upper end of fitness is where I would expect you to actually need to eat more in order to walk more (whereas at the lower end of the spectrum, you have the energy to spare).
I guess it depends how you account for calories, since we use our bodies for a lot more than transportation. I know that I can happily walk 14 miles without changing my food consumption. Maybe my body is just really inefficient the rest of the time (fidgeting, being unnecessarily warm etc).
That makes sense. I don't regularly walk for 14 miles in a day, so I do end up eating more on the rare days that I do, but that also has all sorts of confounders.
There are two objections I can see. First, doing more exercise may not require eating all the extra calories involved. I will ignore that; after all, if you're considering personal tradeoffs, you might actually be in the population where walking an extra 14 miles totally does require eating an extra 1400 calories. But, second, beef (aka cheeseburgers) are known to be a particularly bad source of calories in terms of carbon footprint; see for example https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local.
Assuming you get most of the additional calories from plant-based foods (which seems plausible even if you're not a vegetarian), I'm getting that walking 20 miles requires 2000 calories = 700g of bread = 700g of wheat = 2lbs CO2 (compared to the 16lbs for driving or 1lb for taking a bus). So in this model, walking is less efficient than taking a bus (per mile), but much more efficient than driving. Assuming cycling is 2x as efficient as walking, it's about equivalent to taking a bus (per mile). I agree this would've been interesting to include in the spreadsheet.
Yes, I would love to see a spreadsheet entry for "eating a typical 800-calorie meal" that was more realistic than just a cheeseburger. Maybe a beef fast-food combo and chicken fast-food combo for non-vegetarian meals, a vegetarian pizza for vegetarian meals, and spaghetti with tomato sauce and vegetables for vegan meals?
Something like that, anyway.
I would be surprised if human-produced energy was more environmentally friendly than most alternatives. Humans require very expensive fuel that needs to be preserved over long distances and taste good. Unless you're on one of those diets that gets a lot of calories from dosing olive oil. My intuition says that vegetable fat must be fairly easy to produce, per calorie.
You would actually be surprised how effective humans are at moving, especially when using something like a bicycle plus the exercise is not just extra calorie expenditure. It makes you happier and healthier requiring less medical attention later down the road.
The issue with cars is that you are moving a 2 ton cage around you and producing soot as well as NOx and other compounds.
I object to using the word "carbon" as a short hand for carbon dioxide (CO2).
Elemental carbon is most familiar to us as amorphous black powder. As such it is literally dirty, and if areosolized and inhaled can represent a serious threat to health. It may also be found in crystalline form as diamonds, which no one regards as an environmental problem.
Carbon Dioxide on the other hand, is a colorless, odorless, non-toxic gas that is the basis of all food chains in Earth's biosphere. (yes quibblers, I know about the extremophiles).
It is pretty much unchallenged that the Atmospheric concentration of CO2, which was 280 ppm in the early 20th Century is now about 420 ppm, halfway from 280 to a doubling of 560.
Some "scientists" and some politicians claim that the increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has caused the average global temperature to increase about 1°C from 14.5 to 15.5.
This temperature increase is deputed to be responsible for all kinds of phenomenon -- wild fires, droughts, hurricanes, floods, and rising ocean levels.
Some of them say that we can mitigate or alleviate these problems by removing fossil fuels from our use of energy.
Fossil fuels are cheap, plentiful, and very useful. To get the public on board this effort, some politicians and theier media acolytes are willing to engage in propagandistic techniques.
Using Carbon (black, greasy powder) as a synonym for CO2 (life giving odorless, colorless gas, is deceptive and designed to persuade voters by using fear as an emotion.
I would like to see this practice dropped. If you mean CO2 say CO2. Don't try to conuse already difficult issues.
> Some "scientists" and some politicians claim that the increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has caused the average global temperature to increase about 1°C from 14.5 to 15.5.
Scare quotes here are ridiculous. Are you claiming that C02 concentration is not causing increase in greenhouse effect? That is one of the most transparent science denial.
I didn't say that CO2 does not contribute to the so-called greenhouse effect. It is the amount of contribution that is at issue. IPCC AR6 says that the ECS for CO2 doubling is 2.5-4 K. Judy Curry and Nick Lewis say is is about 1.6 K.
I take the use of word denial as a personal insult. I am a Jew. Close relatives of mine were murdered by the Nazis. Using the word denial in a scientific discussion is an ad hominem of the lowest sort.
That's not how science works. We don't measure the mass in kilograms of the papers for and against a point of view and declare the larger stack the winner. So yours is a sociological, emotional, or political argument -- but not a scientific argument.
> Sea level rise is caused primarily by two factors related to global warming: the added water from melting ice sheets and glaciers and the expansion of seawater as it warms.
Sea rise is not faked. It is measured. NASA has given some numbers derived from satellite orbits. They have been criticized as being insufficiently accurate to provide meaningful data. I do not recall the details but the claimed amount of increase is in millimeters per year and the orbits are not accurately determined within millimeters. Other data comes from tide gauges, that have their own problems like local subsidence.
I am saying that the word deny is being used to silence skeptics by classifying them with Holocaust deniers. It is a base slander. I will not put up with it. It causes me to doubt your good faith.
I think the relevant (2) should be *anthropogenic* climate change, that caused by humans. Ocean levels have been rising since the end of the last Ice Age, and the climate has been gradualling getting warmer, because it does that thing. The Earth's climate is never just stable for tens of millions of years, it changes all the time -- CO2 goes up, goes down, the temperature rises, falls, ice sheets advance, retreat, ecosystems move steadily around.
The *important* questions are: (1) Is it happening much faster than ever before? Which requires you to measure not just sea level rise, but any *acceleration* in sea level rise. And (2) is it happening because of human activity, or would the same thing be happening anyway? Which is a *really* hard question to answer, because it involves accurately predicting a counterfactual: what *would* have been the sea-level rise if the internal combustion engine had not been invented, but all other natural processes had continued to operate? You need to build a model of the Earth's surface which includes every important natural and artificial process, and then carefully delete only the artificial ones. A very tall order, as anyone modeling a complex system can tell you. It's entirely reasonable that people would be inherently skeptical that you did it right.
Carbon dioxide (note the lack of non-sentence-initial capitals) is not odorless. It dissolves in your mucous membranes to form carbonic acid, which has an acidic smell.
Your claims that carbon dioxide does not cause a temperature increase are ridiculous. Are you saying that carbon dioxide molecules do not have a vibrational mode in the infrared? Are you claiming that they will somehow always re-emit the infrared photon that's excited them away from Earth's surface?
At low concentrations botulinum toxin is a medicine. My daughter receives injections of it to prevent debilitating migraines. Poison is made by the dose. Even water can be fatal.
The point is that "normally encountered concentrations" is misleading because the normally encountered concentrations are negligible. The normally encountered concentration of botulinum is 0. The normally encountered concentration of carbon dioxide is around 0.04. If you want to be pedantic, check your facts.
That isn't really relevant. The optical depth of CO2 is sufficiently short that changing the CO2 concentration in the troposphere wouldn't do squat to change the amount of IR absorbed. All that can be absorbed already is by the natural concentrations. It's like adding more salt to a saturated saline solution.
That doesn't mean extra CO2 can't change the surface temperature of the Earth, but the mechanism is *way* more complex than "well CO2 absorbs in the IR, and so that retains energy and the Earth's surface heats up..." The whole "greenhouse" analogy is deeply flawed.
> Using Carbon (black, greasy powder) as a synonym for CO2 (life giving odorless, colorless gas, is deceptive and designed to persuade voters by using fear as an emotion.
That's a very far reaching claim. Equivalent to saying, for example, that using "gas" as shorthand for automobile fuel called gasoline in the US is deceptive and designed to give consumers a feeling of "lightness" and "naturalness" associated with refueling the car, rather than the actual smelly, greasy liquid involved.
Can you make a case why one is a purposefully designed deception and the other just a convenient shorthand?
The most common use (70%) of carbon black is as a pigment and reinforcing phase in automobile tires. Carbon black also helps conduct heat away from the tread and belt area of the tire, reducing thermal damage and increasing tire life. About 20% of world production goes into belts, hoses, and other non-tire rubber goods. The balance is mainly used as a pigment in inks, coatings and plastics.
I'm skeptical of the "replace SUV with regular car" and "replace car with Tesla" numbers. You are going to sell your current vehicle, and someone else will drive it and emit the carbon. If you are buying a new vehicle, getting a Tesla is better than getting an SUV, but once a car is on the road it doesn't matter how often it is sold on the used market.
It depends on how you model car ownership. If before you sell, there are N cars on the road, then once you sell and buy a Tesla, there are N+1 cars. If you assume the number of drivers stays the same, then you sell your car to someone, who sells their car, etc. Somewhere the chain will terminate and some car will drop off the road. At this point, it's probably a fair assumption that it will be on average a gas powered car.
How much discount you apply for each step is a matter of debate, but I don't think it ends up having zero benefit. That said, I've often heard it said that it's better to only go electric when you're going to replace your car anyway instead of doing it early solely for the sake of going electric.
Added benefit: the person who is junking their car at the end of the chain likely has the oldest car in the chain with some pretty bad mileage/emissions.
I think your assumption about the number of drivers staying the same is incorrect, not everyone who wants a car has one. There is always a market for cheap cars that run, the only time a car drops off the road is if it is broken beyond economic repair. There are a lot of poor people who live in cities with bad public transportation and will buy any car they can afford, since it means they can go places without planning around bus schedules or getting rides from friends and family.
Right, my argument depends on at least some new cars causing old ones to drop off the road. Of course, even if it is true that any working cars will immediately get snatched up, there's the question of whether trying to lower carbon emissions by preventing poor people from buying cars is really the right move. (I'm not trying to move the goal posts here, I'm aware this is a separate issue.)
But there's also a market for cars that will rarely run. A city-dweller who usually commutes by public transit or Uber will sometimes buy a car that will be used for errands and out-of-town trips every week or two, or a household will buy a car that isn't used for daily driving but only on the occasion where every driver in the household is going in a different direction, etc.
And half the time, "replace SUV w/regular car" or "replace regular car w/Tesla" is going to mean not actually selling the old gas-guzzler, but keeping it in the garage for when it turns out to be the right tool for the job and until it is junk.
The most efficient cars should be given to the people driving the further distance.
Within a household, this can be done easily, but has anyone tried to figure out how to do it at a larger group? Buying a Tesla for my neighbor who drives 150 miles (each way) to work would be best, but WTF am I buying a luxury car for my neighbor?
Maybe someone has tried to answer this, though. Sounds damn interesting.
Isn't any difference ("difference") a U.S. or European citizen can make by minor lifestyle changes essentially a rounding error — if that! — compared to the actual causes of greenhouse gas emissions (e.g., Chinese industry, Indian agriculture, etc)? Even if everyone in the U.S. together decided to make a few of these little changes?
India produces a lot less CO2 than the USA, despite being way more populous. You can also make anything seem insignificant by comparing your individual actions to the collective actions of a billion people. However with that mindset you might as well fall into nihilism.
I would like to read an argument for the point of view that that reducing carbon emissions (or increasing carbon capture) is a) a good way to combat climate change or b) a good thing to do in general.
>I would like to read an argument for the point of view that that reducing carbon emissions (or increasing carbon capture) is a) a good way to combat climate change
To be clear, I'm aware that reducing carbon emissions is one possible response to climate change. I've read that there are other options, for example, releasing reflective material into the atmosphere. I'm not a specialist and have no idea which approach is best. I'm curious if any SSC readers are better informed on the topic.
> I'm aware that reducing carbon emissions is one possible response to climate change
I was not aware and your question was not indicating that you are interested in comparing C02 control with more speculative ideas. Sorry if that answer was not useful.
Are you wondering why a global reduction in carbon emissions would combat climate change? Or are you asking something more indirect, like how do we know that even if one country reduces emissions, another won't feel free to increase them because of the increased climate headroom?
I'm wondering why the sources I've read (like the linked article), seem to assume that we should react to climate change by cutting carbon emissions, instead of by doing something else, like the options listed in this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering, or perhaps by doing nothing at all.
If that viewpoint is based on data of some kind, I think people should be aware of those data. If there are no data supporting it, that would be important to know as well.
I mean the reason to not do nothing is basically that in the long run it costs more to do nothing than to reduce the warming. The reason why people tend to prioritise emissions reductions first instead of geoengineering is probably because we know emissions reductions will work and there is a lot of research about them, while geoengineering is notoriously under-researched and each technique comes with its own pros and cons.
5% of global GDP yearly seems about right. It basically means that we can solve an existential problem by giving up on two years of growth. It's far from negligible, but it's also very doable - CO2 emissions are almost entirely a *diplomatic* issue where most countries try to dodge doing their part.
Very pleased with how the EU is doing the easy, reasonable, sensible thing - carbon costs plus carbon tolls. This is essentially all that's needed (although the carbon is costed too low still) - the market will sort the rest out.
The two most important lacks I see in this chart are:
(1) It doesn't account for the variation in where your power comes from, which is very important. There is only one source of *new* CO2 into the atmosphere, and that is the combustion of fossil fuels.
For example, let's say you live in Quebec and 90% of your electricity comes from hydro. If you and someone from Indiana, say, whose electricity comes entirely from a coal plant, indulge in the same activity that requires the consumption of X kWh of electricity, then the amount of "carbon" you've contributed is 1/10 that the Indianan contributed.
For the same reason, Frenchmen have a lower "carbon" footprint than Englishmen for the exact same activities, and Californians have a lower footprint than Midwesterners.
(2) It doesn't account for the "carbon" costs of making changes. For example, building a Tesla involves significantly more CO2 emission than building a Honda Accord. People tend to think it works out over the lifetime of the car, if the Tesla uses electricity from some reasonably modest CO2 emitting source, the car is kept a long time, nobody adjusts his behavior in response, but my impression is that it's a close call at best, and it's possible in some cases the net CO2 emission of the change is unfortunately positive.
For that matter, if you consider switching *everybody* in the US to electric cars, and expanding the electricity generation and transmission infrastructure by 40% -- wow, that capital cost in "carbon" is staggering, and the payback period (meaning when you reach net negative "carbon") would probably be decades.
I wouldn't expect you to add some more dimensions to your chart, because of the lack of 3D holographic monitors among your readership, but I feel these are valuable footnotes to add, just so that people consider these "background" issues, too, which can in cases dwarf any "foreground" choice.
No. Cement is made by converting calcium carbonate (chalk, limestone) to calcium oxide (lime) by heating it, driving off the carbon dioxide. If the power to heat the process comes from fossil fuels, so much the worse.
(1) Sure, you need a shit-ton of thermal energy to make cement, and you get that by burning fossil fuels. (There are people who will point out you make cement by reducing CaCO3 to CaO, thus -- aha! -- emitting CO2, but that's silly because what do you think happens when the concrete sets? The CaO turns back into CaCO3, of course, re-absorbing the exact same amount of CO2 that was emitted when it was built.) So this changes nothing.
(2) Where did the carbon in the forests or carbon floor come from? From atmospheric CO2, of course. It's certainly true you're releasing CO2 that was stashed there 100-1000 years ago, but that's not what I'd call "new". Furthermore, it can readily be restored to the same place merely by allowing forest areas to expand (which they have actually done in the United States for the last century or so). It's an easy fix. It's in a whole other category than burning fossil fuels, which emits CO2 that hasn't seen the light of day (so to speak) in 300 million years, and which *cannot* be returned to its source in any easy way.
(3) Methane is generically unstable under oxidizing conditions, so it has to be produced (usually by biological processes) on a short time scale (this is why it's considered a "signature of life" in exobiology), and the only way it's produced is by reduction of atmospheric CO2 by various life forms. Once again, it's not new. There is a major exception to this, which is methane released from natural gas extraction -- but of course, that's in the fossil fuel category.
(1) Volcanoes are part of the natural cycle. I didn't say boo about the enormous number and types of natural carbon sinks and sources, but probably should have specified that for clarity.
(2) As I said above, that's not "new" carbon, it came from atmospheric CO2 on a time scale of centuries, roughly. The distinction is important, because it's quite easy to put "back" into that reservoir -- you just let the forest regrow, as it has been doing in North America for the past 100 years or so -- whereas it is very difficult to do the same with "ancient" carbon extracted from fossil fuel reservoirs.
(3) Well, OK, but that hasn't happened yet, it's still entirely hypothetical, and it's not clear we should consider clathrates in a wholly different category as fossil fuels. They're both fossilized carbon, so to speak.
(4) Methane comes from two places: from fossil fuel (nat gas) reservoirs, and from biological processes, which take atmospheric CO2 and reduce it. Methane from the biological sources is just part of the short-term carbon cycle. Methane from fossil fuel reservoirs is ancient carbon, but it is, of course, a fossil fuel.
And anyway minuscule compared to human activity (AFAIK about 1% of what people emit, large eruptions can reduce overall emissions by grounding planes).
> on a time scale of centuries, roughly
AFAIK permafrost can be far older (but nor rally sure)
> Well, OK, but that hasn't happened yet, it's still entirely hypothetical, and it's not clear we should consider clathrates in a wholly different category as fossil fuels
I was nitpicking "burning" part, they can get released even without power used by humans
> Methane from the biological sources is just part of the short-term carbon cycle.
Yes, but methane is far more powerful in greenhouse effect that CO2 - so even if it is not new coal it is getting much worse
> indulge in the same activity that requires the consumption of X kWh of electricity, then the amount of "carbon" you've contributed is 1/10 that the Indianan contributed
not true if C02 was emitted somewhere else or during part not mitigated by clear electricity
Really not following that. The definition of the "activity" was that it consumed X kWh of electricity that came from burning fossil fuels. So if you're saying X is not actually X, but some other number...uh...I guess so, the person evaluating X could be mistaken, but I'm m not sure what the general point is.
Buying plastic objects I rather suspect is carbon-positive (good) in general, because they take way less power inputs to manufacture and transport than equivalent wood, paper, or steel objects, and they last longer than paper and wood. That's also what makes them more economical, of course.
It is fairly difficult to come up with the equivalent marginal CO2 cost of a suborbital flight at this stage in development. Most of the calculation is driven by subjective calls: how do we amortize prototyping across a limited service life? How do we count non-carbon atmospheric pollutants, and with what adjustment for atmospheric layer? For non-carbon fuels, do we account for the energy cost of their production (and at what carbon rate)?
My best efforts tend to give results in the 30-300 tons/person range (probably closer to the low end), and don't make for very clean citation. Splitting the Falcon 9 launch number five ways gives 74 tons/person, so it's a surprisingly decent ballpark figure.
Hey Scott, I see no other way to contact you in general so I guess I should use a comment. Under what license can your posts (or their content) be used by third parties? Old blog as said here (https://slatestarcodex.com/about/) was under CC BY 4.0 - is that still the case? Is there a difference in paid/free posts? What about images like the blog icon or your avatar? I don't have any particular use in mind right now, so if license depends on the use, that'd be good to know too. Thanks in advance.
Sometimes I wonder how better city planning that would incentivize more bycicle use could have an impact on climate and health. Especially American cities seem poorly planned. This YouTuber really opened my eyes to this:
There seems to be an obvious discrepancy between "Fly on a 747 LA → NYC" and "Send a 747 LA → NYC". The emission ratio implies 180 passengers, while the cost ratio implies 1079 passengers, resulting in a 6-fold difference in "% cost". There could be some difference based on how the costs are calculated, or perhaps if the airliner hauls some cargo for money in addition to the passengers and their luggage, but not this much.
Amazon forest is the only one left ? I know Californians are burning what they have left, for example, but I always consider waaay too political to just pinpoint Amazon as the only one that matters for the world.
> It’s because I’m less responsible [...] they’re probably mostly order-of-magnitude correct, and I believe having probably mostly order-of-magnitude correct estimates is better than having no estimates at all.
We should just popularize measuring CO2 emissions in dB.
Because I am in incurable smartarse, while I appreciated the differentiation between "Amazon (the rainforest)" and "Amazon (the company)", I at once thought "but what about 'Amazon (the queen Hippolyta)'?"
I am rather sceptical towards the idea of offsetting fossil fuels by planting trees.
From my understanding, fossil fuels are very much part of the deep carbon cycle, having been removed from the biosphere for millions of years. Taking that out of the earth, burning it and then paying for someone to plant or keep a tree for (optimistically) some hundred years does not really seem sufficient here.
Of course, on a short time scale, trees might help. If the main goal is to keep the permafrost carbon in place for the next century, or just keep the sea water from rising to much until until fusion power, the second coming, or the singularity etc arrives and a long term solution is reached, trees might be worthwhile. Still, it is a band-aid at best.
What I do not know (and was unable to find quickly) is how long an additional ton of CO2 from fossil fuels will remain in the biosphere carbon cycle until the carbon ends up on the sea floor and enters the deep cycle again. There probably should be an effective half-life (more CO2 -> more plankton -> more seabed carbon)? Of course, this also assumes that the system is still in equilibrium and not in runaway mode (permafrost CO2 being released etc), so this point is probably moot.
The Climeworks approach of turning CO2 into carbonate rock seems better. While I am generally sceptical of geo-sequestration (e.g. just pumping the CO2 into underground structures and hope it happens to stay there forever) to the point of assuming it to be green-washing, carbonates such as CaCO3 are what even I would call a long-term storage, given that limestone mountains are a thing.
Naturally, as long as there are still people around irresponsible enough to burn fossil fuels for primary energy, it would probably be easier to capture the exhaust of the power plants directly instead of getting it out of the air. Still, I can see why one would not want to have a business model depending on irresponsible people.
The natural process of carbonate rock weathering runs faster as the amount of carbon in the air increases. IIRC, it can halve the current atmospheric carbon excess in about a thousand years. So if we can stick carbon somewhere it will take more than a few thousand years to escape, we’ve solved the problem by putting it off. This is why deep-ocean carbon dioxide storage counts as a solution to the problem: overturning circulation will take one or two thousand years to bring that co2 laden water back to the surface.
I'm always terrified we'll pump a bunch of carbon somewhere, think it's okay, and then one day it will all belch out at once, not only willing anyone nearby (not too relevant for the middle of the ocean, admittedly) as well as just putting it right back into the sky.
Although this is an interesting academic exercise the bulk of future emission increases that would make warming a threat are from developing nations raising their standard of living and increasing their populations.
I think these type of efforts are mostly vanity exercises (not accusing this specific author of this) that willfully ignore fundamental problems. If you want to reduce global emissions then you need to make it cheap and easy for people who barely have indoor plumbing to improve their standard of living with low carbon energy.
Professionals contemplating reducing their hours of AC in SF (this is laughable from a Florida perspective) isn't a good guideline to how poor people in Africa are going to behave when their standard of living allows them to have AC. If building a local coal plant makes this half the cost of unsubsidized solar energy then they will make a very predictable decision. See Roger Pielke Jr's decade old iron law of climate policy.
The best thing we can do is use our technical ability to make the cost of low carbon energy cheaper than fossil fuels. Almost everything should be focused on this objective given how increased global emissions will evolve over time and how real world economic decisions are routinely made. Eating less cheeseburgers is a useless distraction.
Much progress has been made on making low carbon energy cheaper. The developing world needs to see choosing this power option as an obvious choice without a condescending first world climate guilt lecture. That's how we make progress.
". If you want to reduce global emissions then you need to make it cheap and easy for people who barely have indoor plumbing to improve their standard of living with low carbon energy."
We have renewable energy sources that are cheaper than fossil fuels , so problem solved....?
I'm not against renewable energy, but somehow there are lots of coal plants still being built today. The people who are making those decisions are clearly not convinced for all the usual reasons. Intermittency, start up costs, etc. Economics underlies these decisions and this still needs work.
- Cool post, agree that it's better to have somewhat inaccurate estimates than to have none. Thank you for promoting climate action!
- Emissions from anything related to electricity depend a lot on the source of that electricity, so I'm not sure how useful the averages are. If you can, it's better to use zero-carbon electricity instead of reducing electricity consumption.
- Emissions from having children are indeed very philosophically complicated. Your approach kind of makes sense, but if you heavily discount future emissions like this, it would make sense to apply the same kind of discounting in other estimates. AFAIK, most people who calculate emissions estimates for various activities don't do this so there's a bit of inconsistency. I don't really have a proposal on how to do this better. I also think that children of climate-conscious people can very well have a positive impact on climate in the future, so go figure.
- Offsets are almost as complicated as emissions from children. My wife, who advises governments on carbon markets, says that for the most part they don't work (because the reductions are not counted against a realistic baseline, there's double-counting, there's no permanence of emission reductions and a host of other problems). Climateworks and similar projects are reasonable though. The best way that we have identified so far is buying credits in a trustworthy emissions trading system like EU ETS and holding them (cancelling them will not work in the case of EU ETS because of a thing called Market Stability Reserve that will release more credits into the market if the supply is too low). There's a company that allows individual to do this: https://www.compensators.org/ -- for as long as the EU doesn't revise how the EU ETS works, this might be a good way. Even better way it to not create the emissions in the first place.
- Planting / saving trees I would see as one of the least reliable forms of offsetting, since with trees you're sending carbon into the future instead of removing it from the cycle. How far into the future is anyone's guess. There are some projects that take permanence somewhat seriously, so you need pay attention to this, if you are into offsetting via planting trees.
- My friends who did research on individual action against climate change say that the most impactful way is political action (which is high on your list). Unfortunately climate-conscious politicians often bring other problems with them (e.g. in Germany the Green Party is anti-nuclear and has some socialist policies that I don't support). I guess it's the same problem as with any other voting: hard to find parties that do no harm in addition to the good that you want them to do.
To run, optimally zero as they utilise zero carbon electricity (they are currently basing the machines in Iceland for this reason)
Build - they allege a 10% grey emission rate, which I think is factored into their offsets. (so you actually buy 100 tonnes of capture per 90 tonnes paid for.)
However, I don't see a published LifeCycle Assessment, so you would have to take it on trust. Presumably, some of the major investors have seen an LCA.
To get "useful" levels of carbon capture, how much would it require our grid to grow?
So, say, assume we made our current grid perfectly zero carbon: how much *more* energy would we want, compared to the size of the grid, to get the *other* major things we want to electrify.
For example, handwavey, to electrify all driving in the US:
To be honest, some of the 'ambitious' seem low-balled, but that might just be my own biases.
Anyways, they think its reasonable that it might take 1 TWh to remove 1 million tCO2 in 2050. Climeworks say that they need "2'000 kWh heat and approx. 650 kWh electricity per ton of carbon dioxide that is captured", which is 2.65 the Mackay Calcs rate.
Assuming USA electricity is decarbonised per your scenario, the remainder of the USA from the table would be 6200 billion lbs CO2, requiring ~3 billion tCO2 offset. Using Climeworks, this would be 8,000 billion kWh (or 8 trillion kWh). Based on data from the US EIA, which put 2019 grid generation at 4 trillion kWh, that would put final US electricity needs at 4.8+8 = 12.8 trillion kWh.
Health warning: with US sources using lbs and short tons and other archaic measurements, I may be a bit off.
Thanks. Just to hand-wave, I'm going to pretend the US needs to spend 50 years taking out the same CO2 it spent 50 years putting in, so taking out about 5000 million tons per year for 50 years. That'll be 5000TWh, or over 100x our current grid.
We're gonna need massive amounts of nuclear power if my is right, even within an order of magnitude, and even if we give ourselves 3x as long to take it out as we put it in.
1.25 current grid to get the 5000 TWh (a billion kwh in a TWh, so current grid is 4000 TWh) for the 50 year drawdown, which makes much more intuitive sense.
To be honest, that would be a noble (and achievable, if expensive!) goal.
On nuclear, I have my own views that come from working on the peripheries of the industry, but if anyone can crack that nut then it can be beneficial to the mix.
I'm sort of surprised that running a dryer is less than one cheeseburger! Since cheese is about half the emissions of beef, and I'm a vegetarian, I wonder if that means that a dryer cycle is comparable to a grilled cheese.
I'm also surprised that adjusting the thermostat by a couple degrees is already a tenth as valuable as being vegetarian!
It was a cool Wednesday morning when I first met Jordan, a middle-aged young man from Twin Falls, Idaho. He had just finished making his shitty keurig coffee before sitting down at the dilapidated PC he built for gaming 8 years ago. As he does every morning, he began working through his morning list of news and blog posts. He noticed a new post on Astral Codex Ten and was eager to begin reading. "What could this one be about?" he asked out loud. But suddenly, his faced filled with dread and he prayed out loud: "God I really hope he doesn't fucking open with some story filled with minute and distracting details. Why does every goddamn article and blog post need to start with a long story before saying the thing they wanted to say!? In my work, this form of self-flagellation is just part of the daily grind" he told me. He began to say something else, but halted and quickly abandoned the thought. After a sigh, he followed the link to Scott's new post.
"Oh, look!" Jordan exclaimed. "Scott just starts the article by saying the thing he wanted to say. I fucking love Scott" he said while wearing the stupidest grin one could imagine. Jordan later told me that his days don't normally begin like this and that [insert transition]...
Haha its not being verbose that's maddening. Its that the first 1 or 2 paragraphs of almost every news article is (apparently) some kind of vacuous "hook" for the reader... who was already hooked by the headline...
Am I the only one thinking that carbon offsets are basically useless? There's the issue Scott mentions, but I think the bigger picture is the cost of buying them means the temptation to free-ride here is enormous, so almost nobody does it. What percentage of people who consider themselves environmentalists and who are concerned about climate change have ever in their lives purchased any dollar amount of carbon offsets, much less do so regularly? I'll bet it's under 5%.
Well, it seems that they are useful to people who think like Scott, i.e. who increase their peace of mind by taking direct personal action to counteract the perceived harm their behaviour caused, without having to endure renouncing said behavior completely. This does seem to be a pretty specific demographic, under 5% of concerned environmentalists sounds reasonable.
There are major omissions and fundamental problems with this analysis, and its conclusions are accordingly misguided and empty.
In sum first, substantiated below:
1/ Household consumption is brushed off as insignificant when it is actually 60% of global greenhouse gas generation, and only direct generation is considered.
3/ This fails to acknowledge or address consumer culture and the profligate waste it engenders.
4/ The import of the figures in the tables for individual activities & actions are grossly minimized by a/ using individual instead of population magnitudes and b/ by using discrete single usage figures instead of annual amounts.
5/ This analysis implicitly wishes for a silver bullet and denies the potential for many smaller changes to make a significant difference in aggregate.
6/ The discussion only posits absurdly hyperbolic options as the alternatives to inaction and resignation.
7/ There is, contra the framing here, abundant cause to conclude that it is more than worthwhile for individuals to invest some of their time and energy toward more conscious consumption and sustainability.
In detail:
1/ Household consumption is estimated to contribute over 60% of global greenhouse gas emissions. (1) Only ~20% is directly generated; the other 40% are generated indirectly by upstream production and trade networks. (2) The “personal activity” section ignores this entirely, considering only direct generation. This omission alone invalidates the conclusions.
2/ Compounding the above, wealthy households contribute disproportionately to GHG emissions. The US is proportional worse than the globe, and wealthier Americans are worse than their compatriots. US households with $150k annual income produce over 2x the average American household, and 4-5x low income households. (2)
Given household consumption generates 60+% of emissions globally, we can therefore conclude that American household emissions represent a disproportionate fraction of that amount. It is therefore worthwhile–necessary even–for Americans to make efforts to mitigate our household impact.
3/ Any examination of individual behaviors and their contribution to climate change that fails to address consumer culture and the profligate waste it engenders is not a serious one. Clothing is a salient example: the fashion industry is estimated (3) to generate 10% of annual global carbon emissions and 20% of global wastewater. And textiles are the largest segment of the US post-consumer waste stream. Producing a *single pair* of Levi’s 501 jeans generates 30 lbs of carbon emissions. (4)
Should we really believe that there’s no room for individual choice to affect this? Could we halve the amount of clothing we consume by choosing quality over quantity and questioning our compulsion for novelty? Should one repair a ripped pant seam instead of just buying a new pair from Old Navy for $20? Or is that “obsessing too much”?
4/ The import of the figures in the tables for individual activities & actions are grossly minimized by a/ using individual instead of population magnitudes and b/ by using discrete single usage figures instead of annual amounts.
Take driving: The table only cites a single car trip of 20 miles, but the average American drives 13,500 mi/Y (5), and there are 328M Americans. 16 lbs for a short trip certainly looks trivial, but hundreds of millions of people, each taking hundreds of such trips is huge. Indeed, cars & light trucks generated 17% of total US GHG emissions in 2018 (8,9). Using your figure of 16 lbs/20 mi driven and estimating 2/3 the population of 328M are drivers, that’s 2,400 Billion lbs of CO2/Y. There are myriad ways for an individual to reduce their personal contribution to this from alternative modes to fewer trips to modified driving style to… the list goes on.
Or air conditioning: There are about 100 million homes in the US with air conditioning. If your 2° AC savings is correct, that’s as much as 24 Billion fewer lbs CO2 emitted / year.
The decision to hide the scale effects obscures the reality that individual behaviors *in aggregate* are often major contributors, and therefore individuals do have cause (a responsibility, even) to inspect and perhaps amend their own practices.
5/ This analysis implicitly denies the potential for many smaller changes to make a significant difference in aggregate. We should not expect or seek a silver bullet solution to climate change.
6/ “all you have to do is spend 11,000 hours without air conditioning, and you'll have saved the same amount of carbon an F-35 burns on one airstrike”
Here one begins to wonder if this is all just trolling. This is an obviously false dichotomy and, as shown above, totally ignores the relative scale. 100 million homes, 2° AC adjustment -> 24 Billion fewer lbs CO2 emitted. If the US flies 10,000 F-35 sorties per yer, that’s 0.57 Billion lbs CO2.
7/ There is, contra the framing here, abundant cause to conclude that it is more than worthwhile for individuals to invest some of their time and energy toward more conscious consumption and sustainability.
The suggested actions are nothing more than a modern version of the assurance that if you just read your scripture (stay informed), say your prayers (vote), tithe on Sundays (donate to charities), and occasionally buy an indulgence (offsets), you can sleep soundly at night with the knowledge you’ll be granted passage at the pearly gates.
“You don’t need to obsess too much…or give up too many of the things you enjoy”
This is tautological and completely fails to engage the issue honestly. The question is not whether one needs to OBSESS or go full ascetic, rather it is whether one should be investing some nontrivial amount of time and effort to be more conscious about consumption and live sustainably.
I don't get how this is either a non-sequitor, or entirely missing the point. The figure of 60% household consumption is just an arbitrary split between different categories. Every emission source (except volcanoes) exists because it directly or indirectly serves household consumption. Some factories make things used in households, others make things used in factories used to make things used in households, and so forth. The military exists to defend households, universities to educate household members, and so on without obvious exception.
It's not like people are 60% and reptiloids are the other 40; everything is people.
No doubt you or I could come up with a proposal as to how, for example, US households could be defended adequately with less than the emissions of the current US military. But that is not very different in principle from a plan to build renewable or nuclear power plants; it's an institutional level decision.
In contrast, when you look at individual, not institutional choices, things are on a different scale. Not because the institutions are not made of people, but because an individual decision only directly affects a household's worth of people. It's just that if enough people make those choices, that changes things.
The message implicit in Scott's numbers is that for many middle class Americans, the most meaningful and effective individual decision they can make may well be to purchase some form of carbon offsets. Your actual objection to that seems to be mostly on religious or aesthetic ('indulgences', 'consumerism') grounds. Which, however valid or persuasive they may or may not be, have absolutely nothing to do with all the numbers and facts in your 9 footnotes. The fact that you feel otherwise seems to suggest that you fail to understand the nature of the argument you are attempting to make.
"It's just that if enough people make those choices, that changes things."
Yes, so why do you dismiss making individual changes to reduce emissions? I'm fairly sure the argument of "I am a single person, my action on its own won't make any difference" has been comphresively demolished when it comes to voting, so treating reducing emissions as different seems silly.
The argument actually being made is that one of the individual actions available to be taken is individually deciding to purchase carbon offsets. If 10% of the people nationally take that action with 50% effectiveness, that solves 5% of the problem at that scale. Which is not nothing, and might have room to plausibly scale up. US consumer spending is 14 _trillion_, 1% of that would buy a lot of trees and/or carbon blocks.
There are obviously lots of other individual actions you could propose adding to Scott's table, and I doubt he would object if you actually did the work to calculate what they could be.
This is all orthogonal to the question of whether institutional changes are necessary; I suspect everyone involved would agree they are, if not exactly which ones.
It would, admittedly, become moot if planned institutional changes were _sufficient_; that would seem a hard argument to make.
The current potential for purchasing legit carbon offsets doesn't come close to the scale of potential reductions from behavior changes. Scott's gold standard, Climeworks, has *total* capacity for 2021 that offsets the car exhaust of merely 727 Americans (4k mt CO2). And anyway, no one believes that offsets are a replacement for actual emissions reductions; at best it buys us a little more runway.
> There are obviously lots of other individual actions you
> could propose adding to Scott's table, and I doubt he
> would object if you actually did the work to calculate
> what they could be.
I've given several examples with "the work", but that's beside the point. The problem is that he's done an analysis with gross omissions, presented it in a misleading way, and dissuaded people from considering they have a responsibility to make any lifestyle modifications, characterizing it as "obsessing" and "giving up too many of the things that you enjoy." The post can't be redeemed with a couple late additions to the tables.
> The current potential for purchasing legit carbon offsets doesn't come close to the scale of potential reductions from behavior changes. Scott's gold standard, Climeworks, has *total* capacity for 2021 that offsets the car exhaust of merely 727 Americans
It would likely grow quickly if there would be enough people to exhaust the current supply
> "household consumption is just an arbitrary split"
No. The basic fact you're missing is that household consumption is by and for a specific individual. It is consumption that would not occur if not for individual, and is a directly influenced by that individual's decisions and behaviors. (More accurately, a small group of individuals, 2.5 on average.)
Since the central question of this post is, "What are the responsibilities of an ordinary citizen facing the threat of climate change?" and 60% of GHG emissions can be influenced by individual choices, I assert that the responsibilities of the individual citizen must include making better choices to reduce their contribution to the problem.
> The message implicit in Scott's numbers is that for many middle class Americans, the most meaningful and effective individual decision they can make may well be to purchase some form of carbon offsets.
Read again more closely, and you'll see that I showed that individual choices he dismisses and omits can actually make a significant difference. And I only gave a couple examples out of the many facets.
As for carbon offsets, let's take Scott's recommendation as the best available option, Climeworks. They have a single facility. It has a total CO2 capture capacity of 4,000 mt/Y. That's 727 American drivers' cars' annual output. So what do we do about the other 225 million American drivers?
The scale of carbon offset offerings simply is not sufficient to support Scott's recommendation. Maybe it will be in 5? 10? 15? years, but it's not practical advice today.
Let's wave a magic wand to set that aside and say it is possible. Is it really so much more reasonable or practical than the other options available to an ordinary citizen that they're not even worth considering?
Take an average household: 2 drivers x 13.5k mi driven per year each, results in 11 metric tons CO2 emitted per year from driving.
Option A: Spend $1000 to offset 1 metric ton of that CO2 with Climeworks.
Option B: Reduce the amount they drive by 9%. About half of all US car trips are 3 mi or less; 20% are less than 1 mile! Walk or take a bike instead. Carpool or take transit 1 day a week. Etc. That lifestyle change is free AND persists year after year. They might even like it!
Option C: Do both! These are not mutually exclusive!
And in fact there are many other areas–heating/cooling, food, consumer goods, etc–in which one can make a meaningful change through modest personal effort and little to no sacrifice or cost, that can be combined.
Therefore, Scott's recommendation is inadequate and he has discarded other possibilities based on faulty premises. His case rests on numbers that are incomplete and misleading, and the only action he suggests that actually results in CO2 reduction is nowhere near the necessary scale to be a real option today. There *are* modest changes individuals can make that will make a meaningful difference in aggregate, and we all indeed have a responsibility to do so.
For weight loss, exercise works for some people, for others dieting alone works, and similarly for both and neither. It's kind of natural for anyone talking about the potential benefits of one to be seen as attacking the other solution, no matter how many caveats they state and how much careful wording they use. And certainly it is very easy to come up with wrong numbers that lead to the wrong conclusion about what the trade-offs are.
The thing is, that rough symmetry does seem to break down when you stop looking at two individual options and go back to looking at things at a societal level. 9% of people individually choosing to cut their consumption by 9% rounds to 0. At that level, it is not incremental progress towards a a solution, it is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
If, instead, half that number chose to become early adopters of electric cars, carbon offsets, or any other potential green technology, then you have a new multi-billion dollar industry researching and developing ways to scale that up.
Only political activism has the same potential to drive, not follow, societal level change.
Driving 9% less was cited as it is the CO2 reduction equivalent to spending $1000/year on carbon capture.
Thus if you believe that driving 9% less is "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic", then ipso facto buying carbon offsets is as well.
Thankfully, that premise is wrong.
* Driving 9% less not the practical or absolute limit for reductions from driving less.
* "9% of people" is arbitrary and begs the question. Of course individual change is pointless if it remains niche
* Your math is wrong. 9% of 9% rounds to 1%, not 0.
* Of course it has to start somewhere, and leading by example is important. Individual changes expand through a social contagion effect.
* "He's still doing it!" is a 5yo's argument against behaving responsibly.
And again, there are myriad other possibilities for individual reductions that are practical and have a meaningful scale, today. Legit carbon offsets are perhaps worth supporting, but they currently only exist at a trivial scale so cannot be treated as a meaningful option for immediate reductions.
> when you stop looking at two individual options
I have been quite clear that I am only providing a few counterexamples which are alone sufficient to invalidate Scott's assertion that there are no individual changes ordinary citizens should consider taking. I am not proposing a comprehensive alternative set of recommendations, merely proving that this ain't it, chief.
The unfortunate truth is that the climate crisis has progressed far beyond the point where can bet on nascent technologies to alleviate the immediate need for us to face the consequences of our actions and amend them accordingly.
> Thus if you believe that driving 9% less is "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic", then ipso facto buying carbon offsets is as well.
The third paragraph of my comment above explicitly explains why this may well not be the case.
> Scott's assertion that there are no individual changes ordinary citizens should consider taking
This is contained in which numbered paragraph of Scott's post? Certainly, I seem to be unable to find it.
In contrast, table #2 contains a list of 11 potential changes, ranging from meaningful to trivial, which different people will find affordable and feasible to different extents. Is there some number of additional entries in that table, or perhaps a different choice of font or formatting, that would have led you to not base your argument on the premise it does not exist?
> far beyond the point where can bet on nascent technologies to alleviate the immediate need for us to face the consequences of our actions and amend them accordingly.
I would reverse that statement, and I believe the numbers support me. However, there is not much point in going into the details of that argument unless you can show a greater willingness to attempt to read what is already written.
Climeworks charges $1000 / ton? Why not grow ironwood, then barge it out into the ocean and sink it. Surely that could sequester a ton for less than a thousand bucks.
Current ETS spot is ~56 EUR, with 1 to 3 year futures at 57-59 EUR. That gives about 3c a lb, or $66 per tonne, about 4 times the 'optimistic' and 6% of the 'pessimistic'.
I realise this may have been addressed in part. But the best question is not ‘how would MY carbon reduction compare with an F14/the Us military/China?’. It’s ‘how would OUR carbon reduction compare?’. It would be helpful if you could to include some rough multiplication factors for various total populations to allow people to estimate the sum-in-aggregate. For example I’ve had a stab using the data here (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/first-world-countries). I tried to take a middle line about the eventual outcome. Taking only the top 30 most developed countries (Norway down to Estonia) totals just over 1Bn population in 2021. Assuming that only one-third of people in those countries can be convinced, eventually, to significantly change their habits gives a multiplication factor to your ‘lifestyle’ column of roughly 340 million. If those 340m people completely decarbonise, by your figures, it would reduce carbon use by nearly 11,000 Bn lbs CO2 per year - bigger than any single emitter on the list except China. Does this not suggest the benefit of finding incentives to persuade the most receptive people to act as a collective?
I'd support a pigouvian tax on carbon emissions (and all other forms of pollution) where the proceeds are given back as UBI. That's really the only policy that's needed on climate, aside from getting out of the way of private industry that wants to build nuclear/renewables. (Zoning/HOAs need to stop prohibiting solar roofs in some places).
But I strongly object to a lot of the apocalyptic rhetoric of some. Cities are thriving right now in temperatures ranging from -40C to +50C. It's absurd that humans wouldn't be able to cope with the difference between 2C and 4C globally.
If we assume for the sake of argument that's true, and we also use Scott's median $100/ton carbon offset cost, then it costs $434,400 to save one life through carbon offsets. That's a couple orders of magnitude worse than malaria nets.
Does anyone know of an estimation which carbon prices a given carbon cap (from an Emission Trading Scheme) entails? Or vice-versa: how a given carbon price from a carbon tax would influence emissions? this relation seems vital to me, yet I havn't seen any study on it.
More specifically, economists would have to study how a certain carbon price (from a tax or a trading scheme) influences the demand for each economic good (apples, meat, concrete, gas, electricity...). Finally, they would have to add up how much carbon is produced by the remaining consumtion. This is vitally important for answering the "social question" of how much poor people will be priced out of carbon production.
If it costs $100 to offset a ton of CO2, then a ton of CO2 should be taxed $100. Each gallon of gas produces 19.6 pounds of CO2. This implies a gas tax around $1 per gallon. But as discussed above, there are wide error bars around the cost of offsets, and there could be economies/diseconomies of scale.
I find the idea of sequestering carbon "permanently" such a turn-off. It's not just that it's a waste of a valuable resource. There's something like a kind of a biological nihilism about it, or at the very least, a sweeping, nonchalant, ignorance about the implied risks.
Imagine we had massive permanent-sequestration capability and then, I dunno, accidentally left it running one weekend, taking global atmospheric CO2 below ~100ppm. The result would be dinosaur-extinction-astroid-impact level destructive. Except worse, because now that the carbon is inorganic and inaccessible, life is not going to just sort of... bounce back.
Obviously nobody is actually trying to scrub every last molecule from the atmosphere, but my problem is that people are starting to act as though CO2 basically nuclear waste. All downside. I reckon if you ask a bunch of 20-somethings who've been steeped in this there whole lives, "what is the ideal level of CO2", a significant fraction will say "zero".
Even if "permanent" doesn't mean "irreversible" sequestration, it seems irresponsible to be treating the carbon cycle as something that can be "shorted to ground", to use a random electrical metaphor.
It's sci-fi until it isn't. When we do develop planetary-scale sequestration capability, it seems pretty obvious we'll have to treat it like a nuclear arsenal. (It's the same with most other geohacking ideas.)
In what sense is carbon a *valuable* resource? I mean, yes, there are useful things you can do with it. But it's not at all in short supply, and if we want more we know where to get it without too much difficulty. And the particular form of carbon that we are proposing to sequester is a particularly odious form, that does us some level of harm if we just leave it lying around and is particularly difficult to turn into anything useful. It is not unreasonable to sequester *that* carbon, while keeping a map of all the places we can go and just dig up much more useful forms of carbon if we find we need more.
Also, we are pretty much by definition proposing to sequester carbon in places we can actually reach, and we're not even putting much effort into making it inaccessible - we're just trying to make it not quite so easily accessible that some passing blob of algae will snarf it up and deposit randomly into the biosphere. So if we really want that particular carbon back, we can go get it without too much trouble.
CO2 is not the odious form from the perspective of photosynthetic life i.e. the root of our food chain. It's the only useful form! You may be one of those who would say "zero" is the ideal atmospheric level. But think about what happens to life under (anything like) those circumstances. You could start with a Google search for "CO2 concentration plant growth rate".
As for the rest, I did note that permanent does not have to mean irreversible -- but my point was that *marketing* it as permanent is a bit of a turn-off if you have the slightest bit of interest in the biosphere (...as something other than an engineering challenge).
I wish we could add at least one traditional bank to the list. I have friends who are into bitcoin, and when someone mentions how carbon intensive BTC is, they counter that it's equivalent to the carbon use of other common ways that people invest or save their money.
I could see that Bitcoin people believe that, but it doesn't make it true.
Some cryptocurrencies are orders-of-magnitude less energy intensive. It's doubtful they're really all about the same as traditional banking or investments[1].
[1] And I've got a bad feeling that the "investment" is something like "well your index fund invests in an oil company."
The train trip LA -> New York seems way too high in cost. The train is supposed to be the most efficient way to travel after bicycle. Also, the native.eco calculator Scott linked as the source states 0.28 carbon tons for the trip.
Awesome! I've been researching this a lot recently and have some information to share:
I recommend donating to founderspledge.com/funds/climate-change-fund instead of catf. They are a fund that transfers the money to a portfolio of non profits after thorough analysis, including catf.
I've been able to get a lot of my friends to donate, I think that with simple enough explanations it's possible to get a large portion of the western population to donate. I think most people care about climate change, but most of them don't know what to do to help. My current recommendation is donating %1 of income - It's an easy to swallow amount that allows high income individuals to offset tens of people.
My best estimate of the price of carbon offset is ~$5/ton (order of magnitude), when donating to founders pledge. In their 2018 research founders pledge estimates that for catf it's 0.1-1$/ton. The greenclimate.fund claim they abated approximately 1.8 billion tons with 8.9 billion dollars of funding - that's $5/ton. I assume they are less effective than catf, and that also they might have exaggerated the carbon amount. Other estimates (such as those in the post) are higher than $5. I remember vaguely that investing in solar is about $20-30/ton, if it's important to someone I'll find the source.
The fundamental assumption that "people existing is bad for the climate" is not just wrong; it's completely backwards.
Everything good that our civilization will ever create in the future, including climate change solutions, will be created by people. And to create good things, people need resources. The fewer children we (as a civilization) have, the fewer people there will be to create things. And, just as importantly, the less economic growth there will be to provide resources for that creation.
The fewer children we have, the less likely we are to ever solve ANY major problem, of which climate change is just one (looking at you, asteroids). And that's not just because a small number of children might grow up to individually do import things for the climate, a la Elon Musk; Tesla could never have succeeded without solid and affordable access to raw materials, supply chains, investors, talent pools, capital, customers, business services, contractors, etc. (And in fact, think how much more effective Tesla, and maybe a non-existent competitor or two, could be right now if the economy were much bigger, giving them access to much superior resources).
More children = more chances for an hypothetical future-problem-solver to be born. But far more relevant and less wishy-washy is: more children = more economic growth = more resources for the many not-hypothetical-problem-solvers to utilize.
Solving climate change will require a lot of new knowledge and new technology. It will also require the expenditure of a huge amount of wealth. The more wealth we have to spare, the better the odds are that we'll be willing to spend some of it on this problem.
Greatly increasing immigration from developing countries to developed ones would help in the same way; by migrating, people gain better access to resources, which makes them more productive. And there are also plenty of humanitarian reasons to support more migration. This is often used as a counter-argument to having more children, saying that we should favor immigration instead. Let's put aside the fact that this makes no sense in its own terms, given that migrating to the developed world increases a person's carbon footprint more-or-less in proportion to how much it increases their productivity. But increasing immigration and increasing birth rate have basically nothing to do with each other, and there's no reason why favoring one would imply not favoring the other. I think we should favor both.
Just as an addendum: the only reason to care about climate change at all is because it will negatively affect humans (even if the most apocalyptic predictions all came true and humanity was wiped out, there's no universe in which the biosphere itself would fail to recover). So really our choices are: have more kids, and solve climate change; or stop having kids, and don't fucking bother.
One number really impressed me, and it must be kind of a blind spot that nobody here addressed it here by now:
Assuming these numbers are correct, the US military is responsible for 1/4 of all US emissions. 3 times the UK. This is just insane.
This means for me that every politician (or even person) who worries about climate change but does not call for a substantial reduction of the US-Military can not be taken serious.
It impressed me too - so much it seemed implausible to me.
So I followed source 29 (and the paper source 29 cited). Both [29] and the paper[p] behind it give a figure of 1.2 billion metric tons (2.65 trillion lbs, nearly the 2.4 trillion lbs of Scott's table) - but for 2001-2017. If we correct for that it's a more plausible 1,5-2% of US emissions - a lower share of emissions than it's 3,7% [mil/gdp] share of GDP interestingly.
To produce one ton of anything in one year, someone or something would have to produce more than six pounds in every second in that year. (There are 31,556,952 seconds in one Gregorian year. There are 2,000 pounds in one ton. 31,556,952 seconds divided by 2,000 pounds equals 6.337 pounds per seconds. How much would a bull have to weigh to produce to produce that much fecal matter every second it is alive?
For those interested in buying Climeworks at https://climeworks.com/subscriptions, it costs $30 per month to remove 20kg of CO2 a month, or a cost of around $1,400 per ton. Sorry, prices haven't fallen since the 3 years this was posted.
We need a report button, even if it delivers an electric shock when we press it.
This
I'm the sort of "environmentalist" who just likes a better general environment, and it's a big reason we have an electric mower. I loved my old reliable duct-taped Honda mower, but I love even more not dealing with the sounds and smells of a gas mower. One of the nicest things about electrification is the quiet.
Don't stop at 6". Let it reach 18" and encourage wildflowers
Is there a way to access that chart as a Google Doc, an Excel file, an HTML table, or basically any other format besides an image ? The image is pretty hard to browse.
Here's a not-officially-cleaned-up-for-public-release spreadsheet: http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/carbon_round.ods .
Thanks!
Awesome, thanks !
HTTP*S* version of link to avoid browser block of insecure download:
https://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/carbon_round.ods
Something I don't see discussed enough when we're talking about limiting AC/heater/other electrical usage, etc. Is that under reasonable assumptions (e.g., $50 per ton CO2 externality cost), the retail price of electricity is often already too high relative to the societal marginal cost. So just the cost you pay to your utility to use your AC is already higher than if a bunch of environmental economists got together and got to play dictator and made the retail electricity rates what they "should" be based on the marginal cost of electricity and the externalities that generating the electricity produces.
Mostly this is because the electricity industry is so heavily fixed cost based. The marginal cost of a kWh is usually in the 2 to 3 cent range. Most utility rate setters know this and always argue that utility bills should have some something like a fixed contracted demand charge of like $60 and then the per kWh price should be like 3 cents. The regulators then promptly ignore them and tell them they can have a fixed charge of $2 and a 20 cent per kWh rate because voters don't like fixed charges.
So the typical spread between retail price of kWh and marginal cost of a kWh is somewhere in the 10 cent range for the average American. But in places like California it can be much higher. And in some places the spread is lower and what I'm saying here doesn't apply to those places.
That said, if all the societal cost of pollution and carbon is less than that 10 cent gap (and if we use the realistic CO2 offset numbers found in Scott's post, they are), it means society is not over-using ACs and heaters. The benefit we get from them are greater than the cost they incur, including the added pollution and CO2.
I'm not sure what this implies for someone who cares about CO2 offsets though. On one hand, your utility bill is already priced such that if running your AC is worth the utility bill increase, it's also worth the carbon increase it causes. But on the other hand, utilities/society aren't using that money to offset CO2 like they would if there were carbon tax or cap'n'trade, they're using it to pay for all those fixed costs the regulators won't let them charge fixed amounts for. Therefore, if you don't do anything, the CO2 will be left unoffsetted. So maybe you use the AC/heater as much as you'd like given the utility bill increases it causes, then completely separately from the decision on how much AC to use, go and offset that amount?
This would all be much easier if we just had a carbon tax where revenues went to CO2 offsets or other societal improvements. It's really hard to unilaterally get this right. *sigh*
For California you also need to include the cost of wildfires, which seems to be "all the money they collect, and then some." According to the courts, anyway.
Does that cost actually *include* the other costs? If all of what you're paying goes to the cost of generating the electricity, then these costs "should" be *added* to what you're already paying (or some other cost to compensate people harmed by carbon emissions).
Electric utilities are natural monopolies, which means the marginal cost (MC) of production is always below the average cost. See:
https://www.economicsonline.co.uk/Business_economics/Natural_monopolies.html
You reach societal optimal production/consumption when you price at MC. This is because if the incremental benefit society gets from one more unit of consumption is greater than the incremental cost of that production, you want people to consume more. But if the incremental benefit is smaller than the incremental cost, you want them to consume less. This reaches equilibrium where marginal cost is equal to marginal revenue, MC=MR.
For most industries, free markets and perfect competition will eventually reach that point.
But it never will for natural monopolies like electric utilities.
Because marginal cost is always below average cost, the utility will not collect enough revenue to maintain operations if it's subject to competition. Roughly what happens now (when there's no competition), is large politically connected companies with large load will go to the utility and say, "I don' want you to charge me your average cost, I want a discount. I'll go build my factory somewhere that will give me a discount if you don't give me one. I know you could price down to your marginal cost and still be ok." And usually utilities give in and give them some type of price between MC and AC. However, this means some other group of customers is paying for infrastructure that the large factory is using.
Once the infrastructure is built, it's 'rational' for the utility to agree to that bargain (price below average cost) to any customer who has a serious threat of actually leaving for some other utility. So under competition, utilities would realize that they'd never be able to recoup the cost of infrastructure and wouldn't make necessary investments for a reliable electric system.
(Note this is different for industries that aren't natural monopolies, even if they have lots of fixed costs, because eventually they'll reach output levels where the average cost and marginal cost converges. What makes a natural monopoly a natural monopoly is that they'll never reach that point)
But none of this changes the fact that society is still at it's optimal production/consumption point when the utility is pricing at it's marginal cost. You don't want to include the ATC less MC portion of costs when figuring out where the most efficient price/quantity is. So the utility needs to have some other way of collecting those fixed costs that wouldn't be collected if it charged MC (in the past, economists have even proposed things like have utilities price at MC and then subsidize them via taxes for the infrastructure investment shortfalls).
So if we're including CO2 externalities, the societal optimal price is the utilities' MC plus the externality, not the utilities' AC plus externalities.
I'm aware of how monopolies work, but that seems rather orthogonal to how externalities are accounted for. I think this sentence of yours is the upshot:
"So if we're including CO2 externalities, the societal optimal price is the utilities' MC plus the externality, not the utilities' AC plus externalities."
We can have a carbon tax no problem. But one where the revenues actually end up reducing CO2 emission is a different story. We've had gasoline taxes for decades, and big chunks of that revenue are routinely diverted to purposes other than building roads and bridges.[1] The famous Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement in the 1990s collected an enormous amount of money (in principle $200 billion) from cigarettte manufacturers (who obviously then collected it from smokers), and the stated purpose of this "tax" on cigarettes was to cure the externality of smoking -- to pay for the damages, e.g. costs of treating smokers, and mitigate future harm, e.g. by trying to prevent the next generation from taking up smoking and encouraging present smokers to quit. In the end, very little of that money was spent on anti-smoking initatives[2], and a great deal was diverted to purposes that had nothing to do with paying for externalities, and in cases was even perverse, e.g. according to [3] 75% of the money North Carolina received as of 2016 was actually spent supporting tobacco production (an important tax-revenue-generating industiry in NC to be sure).
So I would say, practically speaking, Step #1 is to find an efficient and effective way to *spend* tax money that accomplishes the object. If that can be done, then how exactly the tax revenue is acquired is not especially urgent. It could certainly come from a carbon tax, in order to serve as an incentive as well as a revenue generation machine, but it could come from general tax revenue as well and that isn't an especially important change. The key is to ensure that a noble-sounding "carbon tax" doesn't degenerate into just another siphon pumping taxpayer dollars into the trough of government swill to which an infinite number of piggies can snuffle up eagerly.
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[1] https://reason.org/policy-brief/how-much-gas-tax-money-states-divert-away-from-roads/
[2] https://www.medpagetoday.com/primarycare/smoking/76496 Nut graf: "[In] fiscal 2018 less than 3% of the Master Settlement funds went to [tobacco control] programs."
[3] https://www.lung.org/blog/who-benefit-tobacco-settlement
The purpose of a carbon tax is to place incentives into a market economy by making non-carbon-expensive products relatively more profitable. It would be nice to use the profits in beneficial ways but the tax works even if you throw the proceeds into a ditch.
Obviously, rebating all of the proceeds to carbon intensive industries would hamstring the whole thing.
Well, that's *some* proponent's main purpose for a carbon tax, sure. But they're completely delusional in my opinion. I'm sure a carbon tax that is politically sustainable could have *measureable* effects on CO2 emission, because we're pretty good at measuring small numbers these days. But I don't think it will never come even remotely close to changing emittions to the level proponents want to change it. And the history of social engineering through the tax code generally is extremely discouraging, filled with stories of unanticipated side effects and dynamic responses, and no major success stories at all, as far as my memory serves.
So instead I take at face value what different proponents of the carbon tax say, which is that the main purpose of the tax is to collect revenue to ameliorate the externalities of CO2 emission in ways that only government can, because of collective action problems et cetera. This purpose at least has the benefit of not depending on having a crystal ball to predict the social psychology of 330 million people -- you just collect the money and spend it on Remediation Program X, which directly addresses the problem. It *may* be as a side effect of the tax people change their behavior to reduce emissions, but that's just candy on top and you aren't depending on it for the tax to be useful.
But then, as I said, Step #1 is determining what X is.
A carbon tax is a Republican (Capitalist) version of investing government money in solar panels technology and wind. The idea is that if you price the externalities the market takes care of itself.
This is much like how Obama Care was Republican (Heritage Foundation) version of universal health care.
Yes, as I said, I understand the theory. I find it completely implausible.
I wouldn't call this a Republican idea. There's even more support among moderate Democrats. But yes, a carbon tax is a lot more palatable to conservatives than other plans like the Green New Deal.
I don't think the comparison to the ACA is a good one. I think universal health care is a good idea -- health care markets suffer from market failures, and are a case where you get a better outcome if the government steps in. Carbon emissions being free, yet having a huge cost to society, is another kind of market failure, and carbon taxes are a very good solution to that problem.
I agree people are underestimating the problems with a carbon tax. One economic modeling study (maybe Pielke or Nordhaus?) found it doesn't take much of the world economy ignoring the tax for most of the efficiency benefit to evaporate as carbon sensitive industry moves to the low or no tax areas. A uniform and substantial worldwide tax is a big if
I think greater efforts should go into designing a market for innovation where rather than someone choosing what to research from the top there are simply major artificial payoffs based on the carbon reduction benefit vs cost of new technologies. This should also have a bigger short term effect on development of transformative technologies vs the carbon tax's more medium to long term effect
Another field with more assurance of working is geoengineering. In "Smart Solutions to Climate Climate Change" the equivalent costs for removing one ton of carbon by air capture was $.05 for Marine Cloud Whitening and about $5 for firing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. The sulfur dioxide costs and benefits should be fairly reliable while the cloud whitening estimate would have to be two orders of magnitude higher to reach the same price, for deployment of each at a level that would reduce temperatures by 2 degrees. A single "anti-rogue" nation could do it alone
A further benefit of developing potential geoengineering techs would be to reduce the number of kids having nightmares about the world ending with a reliable backstop being understood to exist. In the adult realm this should also translate to better policymaking less coloured by fear and desperation
There's a ton of places you could usefully spend tax money to improve the situation. You can obviously spend it on research. The field of climate studies is hideously cramped by a lack of comprehensive data. It's one reason well-informed reasonable people can seriously doubt the relevance of the predictions of global circulation models to reality. The data are, of course, in many cases difficult to gather at the private level because of the need for global coverage -- and this is exactly the kind of thing at which government can be quite good.
Secondly, you can spend it on R&D in bioengineering. The most obvious way to sequester carbon is simply to patch into the existing massive natural carbon flows that go through photosynthesizing organisms. We already know a wide range of organisms from plankton to redwoods are very efficient at pulling CO2 out of the air and turning it into solid stuff -- indeed, the very hydrocarbons the combustion of which concerns us. The obvious way to close the cycle is to find ways to industrialize that, to get the hydrocarbons we combust directly from an engineered organism that uses sunlight and water to make the hydrocarbons. There are obviously practical challenges, but it's a very plausible route forward, because Nature has already shown us it can be done -- we know the biochemical machinery already exists, and we just need to tweak it to meet our industrial needs. Furthermore, it's way less risky than large-scale geoengineering, because it's easy to tune in almost real time. Too much CO2 being produced? Grow some more engineered alga and stash the hydrocarbons in some cave. Too little? Burn some of your stashed hydrocarbons and cut down on the sunlight to the algae (or whatever).
The problem for any private R&D effort is the putative product (engineered biodiesel say) couldn't compete with the stuff pumped from the ground if it has to amortize big fat R&D costs -- the payback is almost certainly too long for private firms. But that's why we have a government, to invest in stuff with a payback period too long for private money, and to compensate for paybacks (reduction of global warming) that the private manufacturer can't directly capture as revenue.
And of course, if the whole hypothesis turns out to be screwy in some major way, e.g. increased CO2 turns out to be the result of global warming and not the cause, government is exactly the kind of people who could have been usefully spending just-in-case Plan B money figuring out how to predict and manage the effects of temperature change about which we can't do anything, or not as much as we hoped.
I wish I could remember the name, but there's a good podcast I heard with people discussing geoengineering. The issue with it is that you're avoiding solving the real problem and trying to put a band-aid on it. The more carbon in the atmosphere, the more you have to do your counteracting geoengineering project, and if you ever stop, you're suddenly in huge trouble. And a lot of these geoengineering ideas may cool down the earth a bit on average, but their effect is not uniform across the globe -- an area that's not cloudy can still get deadly hot, and I wouldn't be surprised if bigger temperature differentials results in more chaotic weather.
I agree it's bad to terrify people about climate change. It's not even helpful -- scared people aren't more likely to act, they just try not to think about the scary thing. We gotta solve the problem, but we'll get it done. It's just that the longer we wait the harder it'll be.
Going back to the issue of carbon sensitive industry moving to places without taxes -- the way to fix this is with a border adjustment. You add a tariff to goods coming in from places without a carbon tax. The EU is working on theirs right now I believe, it's called the CBAM (Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism).
Indeed the risk of a sudden disruption was discussed or even estimated in the Smart Solutions book although not included in their main estimate. It's just that the estimated benefits are so high there's really a case for it. A particular strength of cloud whitening is that it could be deployed locally giving it an ability to reduce equator temperatures specifically which might reduce temperature differentials as a side benefit. (possibly even effective in dampening hurricane intensity) While estimates of the economic effect of warming that I've seen have overall benefits as high as 2 degrees from pre-Industrial, part of the reason for that is that the benefits are focused in northern countries with larger GDPs and the costs more in southern ones with smaller GDPs so there is a problem of higher marginal costs and lower marginal benefits. If cloud whitening were effective we could run right past long term projects with high costs that will - at best - reduce equatorial climate costs. Do pass Go, and immediately collect $200
I don't see it as entirely a band aid aside from that because the direct effect of CO2 doubling is a temperature rise of 1 degree Celsius. It's logarithmic. This is the warming effect that there is actually in the neighborhood of a 97% consensus about. What this means is that high temperature projections rely on CO2 warming causing a cascade of other warming effects. If geoengineering simply counteracted the CO2 warming all the other theorized warming effects are put on hold, essentially buying a century or two to innovate past carbon. It is likely that this would result in a state of higher CO2 in the atmosphere but the costs avoided (based on linear to semi-exponential warming estimates) are tremendous
I think I'm one of the folks you think is delusional :) I agree with you that the level of the tax really matters. You can put a tax of $20/ton on CO2, and it'll raise the price of gas by about $0.20/gallon, which is nice but won't get us very far. On the other hand, you don't want to suddenly whack people with a tax that'll make gas prices go up by $4.00/gallon or something.
I think the most effective plan is to start out small but with a gradual increase every year, at a rate that is expected result in the GHG emissions cuts we want. That's something people can plan for, and that planning means people start acting on it early if they can. I like the way the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act (EICDA) does it, which is that it increases the tax by $10/ton every year, or $15/ton if we aren't hitting emissions targets.
As for what to do with the money, again I think the EICDA is a good plan -- divide it up evenly and give it back to people. This is designed to address the issue of political appeal and sustainability. I'm someone who could manage ok with the price of fossil fuels and everything that depends on them going up pretty drastically, but there are lots of people for whom that would be disastrous, and I wouldn't blame them for opposing it. Giving people a monthly dividend is a good way to ensure that a program has continued support. You end up with a competition -- if you can reduce your emissions below that of the average American, you end up ahead financially. It's a race to the bottom, in a good way.
The reason I think a carbon tax is more effective than a remediation program (or a bunch of programs), it's that this is not a problem that is easy to address directly. X is too multifaceted, because carbon emissions are intricately interwoven into most things we all do. Government programs may be able to hit the big targets -- incentivise electric cars, energy standards, etc, but just going for the big targets leaves a lot of untapped potential for emissions reductions.
I think the least painful, lowest cost way to address the problem is to make millions of small changes in addition to thousands of medium and hundreds of big changes. Until we're on all renewable energy, it can help a lot if everyone just makes some small changes. Usually "if everyone would just..." is followed by "yeah that'll never happen", but a carbon tax is how it can actually happen. It's how you get a hundred million people whose water is heated by gas (or oil, or electricity originating from coal or gas) to turn down their water heater thermostats and take shorter showers (I'm a bit skeptical of Scotts 0.1 lbs CO2 for a 10 minute shower figure btw -- water is hard to heat up). Some people won't, but enough will that it'll matter. People will take fewer flights, drive less until they get electric cars that charge with green power, swap out their last few incandescent bulbs, insulate their houses better... there are hundreds of little actions we can do with very little individual cost that will cut emissions by a lot in aggregate, *in addition* to all the big obvious ones. People that live where they get power from alternative energy won't have to make as big changes, people who get power from coal will -- and so not only will we switch to coal power plants, in addition, some people will actually decide to live where green energy is available! It won't be the main factor for most people, but it'll weigh just a bit into decisions, every day, for everyone. A carbon tax provides gentle but firm and inexorable pressure in the direction we want to go.
I think it's quite true that a revenue neutral carbon tax is the best option. It's far more politically possible and addresses the higher marginal costs to low income people with a higher marginal benefit rebate that would hopefully prevent fuel poverty
There are some special problems such as farming where a flat rebate will do nothing to match the carbon tax costs faced which would require highly adjusted taxes or highly boosted rebates but in general it's doable. The key problem I will say is that, as in BC, a promise of a revenue neutral tax isn't a guarantee at all:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-commentary/bcs-carbon-tax-revenue-neutrality-couldnt-survive-exposure-to-politics/article36488526/
I'm not coming at this from the point of view that I think I can pick logical holes in any logical argument for why a carbon tax would work. I may find the theory plausible myself, or I may not. I'm coming at it from the empirical skeptic's point of view, in the sense that I normally doubt *any* hypothesis about how 300 million people are going to react to a top-down change in the rules, e.g. a national* carbon tax.
So instead I look for precedent that can supply empirical data. Has this kind of thing ever been tried before? Did it work? Did it have unexpected side effects, as a result of political reality and/or dynamic response?
And in this case, I can find precedents, and they don't look good. Carpool lanes on the highway were supposed to strongly encourage people to...well, carpool. They didn't. Bottle deposits were supposed to radically reform the rate of recycling of bottles and cans. They might to some extent where the deposit is high enough, e.g. MI where I think it's 10 cents, but in other places they do zip, e.g. in California where it's a penny or so it doesn't change behavior at all. Cash for Clunkers was supposed to take a whole lot of polluting cars off the road that would've been kept running anyway. It didn't. And of course there have been any number of healthcare reform bills that were supposed to rein in medical cost inflation, or eliminate the problem of the un- and underinsured, and none of them have.
That doesn't mean behavior hasn't changed, and in some cases by a fair amount. Solar panel tax credits put a lot of panels on the roofs. Not nearly enough to phase out coal plants, but enough to make some noticeable changes in electricity generation, in some places. And at a cost of taxpayer subsidization of 30% (!) of the capital cost.
The common theme seems to be that you can get serious change, if you are willing to spend/transfer serious money -- but then you run the risk of bigger political issues (people notice it's just the rich owning their own homes long-term who are getting the fabulous solar deals, and the poor living in rented apartments aren't) and bigger unanticipated practical issues because the change didn't happen organically, it was imposed, e.g. California's struggle with electricity in the evening because too much of its power is locked into being generated in the afternoon when the Sun is high.
Or, on the other hand, you can make smaller feel-good measures, like the miniscule Obamacare "tax" for not being insured, or a 1 cent bottle deposit, and these don't cost as much, and don't attract as fierce political struggles, but they also don't really change behavior enough to do anything important. They're just national virtue signalling, like reducing the highway speed limit to 55 during the "Energy Crisis" of the 1970s -- which had absolutely zero long-term effect on US oil consumption.
Now maybe It Will Be Different This Time, as every social planner has said since the time of Ramses II. Maybe *this* scheme *will* change behavior enough to matter, in a way that isn't too generally disruptive, doesn't create weird new political or practical problems that weren't anticipated, won't poison the well by failing spectacularly and expensively...all possible. I'm just very, very skeptical. And I'm not basing it on any particularly critique of your argument, just sort of a "laws of thermodynamics" impression of what a nationful of people tend to do.
And that's why I said: screw the social engineering. Stop trying to read 300 million minds, predict accurately what they're all going to do, and exactly how you have to tweak their personal incentive structure to get where you want to be. Just figure out where you can spend the money to address the problem directly, and do that, using the usual mechanisms for the government acquisition of money. (As I said elsewhere I find the hypothesis that the problem can *only* be effectively addressed by individual action dubious -- I think there are lots of things that can be done at the government level that could and probably would be extremely helpful.)
What about raising the price of cigarettes?
We already know that smoking rates have plummeted. What made the difference?
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0204416#:~:text=Notably%2C%20increases%20in%20cigarette%20tax,64%3B%20and%200.2%25%20reduction%20in
https://www.tobaccofreekids.org/us-resources/fact-sheet/raising-cigarette-taxes-reduces-smoking-especially-among-kids-and-the-cigarette-companies-know-it
We should note that since nicotine is strongly addictive, smoking should be one of the hardest behaviors to modify.
The tax is the key, not the spend. Even if revenues are diverted to a swill trough (not my preference), the tax itself reduces emissions by changing the economics of carbon use.
The spend, however, may be key to whether a carbon tax ever gets enough support to become viable.
I'm glad there's at least one expert commenting here. Welcome!
I'm aware of the theory. My opinion is that this particular theory hasn't a prayer of working in practice, but that the simpler alternate theory that a tax can usefully address externalities directly does.
For example, people visiting National Parks have an adverse impact on wildlife, which is an externality difficult to address at the individual level, since it can't easily be traced to any one person or act. Creating an admissions charge to National Parks which funds government activites can directly remediate the externality by e.g. building fences and trails to corral the people, hiring rangers to keep the people on the trails, building parking lots outside the gates and running electric busses inside the park, et cetera. And this is much more likely to be efficient and successful than hoping that you can reduce visitation sufficiently by the discouraging effect of a politically-sustainable level of admission charge.
Sure. In general you can try use tax policy to solve a problem, or you can try to use spending policy to solve a problem. If you're using spending policy, the source of the money is irrelevant to the policy. National Park wildlife could just as easily be "saved" using general tax revenues as with admission fees, but for political and ethical issues of fairness.
Which approach might work better depends on the problem. Can you spend money in a way that would massively reduce carbon emissions? Maybe, if you finance R&D of new green technologies that are cheaper, or subsidize green technologies. Either way, they work by making industrial/consumer use of green technologies the cheaper choice.
That's also what a carbon tax would do, directly and through market forces, except that you can also conveniently set the tax rate to match the external cost.
In principle, anyway. Mark Jaccard's book (The Citizen's Guide to Climate Success) convinced me that an effective carbon tax will probably never happen.
Yes, the first part is roughly what I said above: *if* you can identify spending that would effectively address the problem, you can just do that, and then *even if* your tax doesn't change behavior enough, or the way you wanted, you're still good. It's a solid conservative (i.e. cautious) approach that has multiple ways to succeed. That's why I think it makes more sense. And since I think it almost certainly *is* possible to identify government-level spending that has a decent chance of addressing the problem, that would be my policy recommendations, if ever a politician asked me for advice ha ha.
Do you have an article/book recommendation for this argument on why the taxation side of a carbon tax probably wouldn't have much benefit compared to just appropriately allocating spending on carbon reduction initiatives? It's not an intuitively obvious conclusion to me, but you seem to believe it pretty strongly it and you sound reasonable.
I don't follow your logic, especially the bit about carbon offset costs being equal to societal costs.
If the taxes are inefficiently spent they represent a loss of social value, and if the climate benefit of the tax doesn't cover that cost it is a total loss for the difference
Further augmenting this concern is that the costs of a carbon tax are relatively regressive, as a consumption tax having a greater marginal effect on the poor - people freezing or overheating to death being the most extreme costs
(due to fuel poverty)
What is the easiest way to convince oneself that carbon = bad?
That question sounds really strange to me. Either carbon is bad, or it isn't, it doesn't care how much you believe or disbelieve in it. I think it's better to convince oneself to believe in things that are true, generally speaking.
Well the post is talking about environmental responsibility. I would consider it a possible outcome that a that life and consciousness could flourish more in an atmosphere with more carbon than current levels. Should not our framework for responsibility attempt to quantify "flourishing" instead?
I would say that in the year 2021, you either think that significantly more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than we have now is really bad, not bad at all or even good, or you're 9 years old and learning about this issue for the first time. In all cases, in the year 2021, unless you're planning on rolling up your sleeves yourself and becoming a climate scientist, which position you hold is probably a matter of trust. If you trust Republicans, you will think that it's maybe not bad. If you trust Democrats, you will think it's bad. You might just trust your dad and your dad told you
If you don't trust either of those two teams, another entity you could trust is the general process of science. What has happened w.r.t. the climate is somewhat interesting: a whole lot of different scientists from previously unrelated fields suddenly had something in common, because many of them made independent discoveries that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and oceans was no longer something that they could ignore, even just in the sense that it was something they had to be cognizant of in order to continue conducting research. Biologists of all kinds had to grapple with really high losses in biodiversity. Marine biologists in particular observed a common theme: increasing ocean acidification (the ocean is/was slightly basic, so it's been moving slightly towards neutral) was harmful for a bunch of marine life with particular pH sensitivities. Meteorologists know that the temperature of air and water is strongly predictive of the strength and frequency of storms like hurricanes. Agronomers, since the dust bowl, have been always trying to get better at avoiding the problems of soil erosion and nutrient depletion, and anything else that might ruin a crop season.
So even though there are a lot of wacky, religious environmentalists using climate change as their apocalypse, it just doesn't make sense that this pseudoreligion is so compelling that it captured the entire scientific establishment. Consensus is a really hard thing to build in science, especially across so many disparate fields.
So given that this is, in 2021, a matter mostly of trust, I would argue that the easiest way to convince yourself that carbon = bad is that you have a whole lot of scientists saying that it's bad for a thousand different reasons, so the probability that they're collectively all wrong is extremely low. And so the only alternative explanation that I can think of is that they're all victim to motivated reasoning via the aforementioned pseudoreligion, and I think that's a lot more fantastical than believing that humanity is capable of polluting too much.
Who are you talking about?
That's all fine, I'd just rather see a prediction market in something more like flourishing than CO2 level. That way the impact of CO2 can be updated as technology and knowledge progresses, which is not something that we can calculate. Maybe there's a way to seed the oceans and massively expand flourishing, idk. My only argument is we should incentivize terminal values, not instrumental values.
A prediction market for "flourishing" would be a million times harder than a prediction market for PPM CO2. "Flourishing" isn't a terminal value, it doesn't even have terminal semantics. What you mean by flourishing and another person are different.
It's a bit like saying "The height of the Titanic is just an instrumental value. I'd prefer a model of how much the passengers will be flourishing before I decide that sinking = bad."
Obviously I'm not going to attempt to quantify "the common good" here. It's very hard but I think it's better to try than not to try. I'd rather have an explicit utilitarian framework than an implicit one.
>And so the only alternative explanation that I can think of is that they're all victim to motivated reasoning via the aforementioned pseudoreligion
Huh. To me, the obvious alternative is that everybody is afraid to speak out against the consensus, because anybody who dares to do so these days is cast out as a pariah. This, by itself, doesnt prove that the consensus is false, but if it is, there's not much chance it will be exposed as such any time soon.
Well no, frankly, this seems way more ridiculous to me. Science isn't social justice, and it isn't politics. Speaking out against the consensus is very easy to do. In fact, proving the consensus wrong is extremely highly valued. But you have to have the goods.
Like if you're in a local chapter of the Sunrise Movement, (this is a true story from a friend of mine), you might become an outcast for suggesting that "maybe we shouldn't be opposed to nuclear power" without being given a chance to present your argument. Or if you're in the Republican Party, you might be outcast for suggesting that Trump didn't actually win more votes than Joe Biden. But these are political organizations, not hundred-year-old institutions formed around uncovering truth with an honored tradition of "proving people wrong." This can even sort of be the case in social science, where sample sizes are smaller and the data is more open to interpretation. But in the hard sciences this makes no sense.
If you're a biologist, you can try to argue against the consensus that biodiversity is plummeting. Your colleagues will absolutely listen to you. You'll need to show where all the animals went, and if you don't have a convincing theory with corroborating data for why biologists everywhere are finding less biodiversity, your colleagues will probably tell you that your explanation doesn't make any sense. And if you keep on it without having persuaded anybody, yes eventually they'll kick you out of the lab group because you don't seem to have trustworthy scientific judgement. But nobody is going to immediately cast you out as a pariah for challenging the consensus.
Now you could say "sure that's how science used to work, but is no longer," but to convince anyone of that you'd have to explain why science was good at converging towards truth for hundreds of years and why and when it somehow became the Spanish Inquisition.
I think science still converges on the truth. But the rate of convergence is an interesting question, and what happens on the way is not as simple as you may be implying. In fact, it's usually not smooth. What seems to happen is that there is a dominant paradigm, and minority views are...well, not actually brutally suppressed, Inquisition style, but something that can definitely impact a career at the margin, particularly in the modern days when your livelihood depends not on some wealthy patron, with idiosyncratic ideas, or your own inherited fortune, but on sufficient praise from the community on your research grant application reviews. (Which is to say, the greatest threat today to scientific objectivity is arguably our insiders' popularity-content funding model. I don't think it's an existential threat, but it's influence is neither tiny nor entirely benign.)
The dominant paradigm then seems to stays pretty dominant, until some weird tipping point is reached, and some kind of preference cascade results in a pretty sharp switch to a new paradigm, and the cause of the switch seems only partly the accumulation of experimental data, and also partly assorted social psychological factors among H. sapiens.
There are plenty of historical examples. For example, the "mechanical/atomistic" view of matter, which was considered mental masturbation for much of the 18th and 19th centuries, clearly wrong (inasmuch as it was incompatible with irreversibility, which any idiot can see dominates macroscopic mechanics). Although I'm sure he had underlying issues of greater impact, Ludwig Boltzmann was driven (in his own mind) to suicide by the hostile reception his efforts at tackling irreversibility through an atomistic/mechanical model received. But then kind of suddenly in the last part of the 19th century, everyone accepted atoms, and a mere decade or so later you would be considered some kind of hairy uneducated untermenschen to not take the atomistic universe as gospel.
"you'd have to explain why science was good at converging towards truth for hundreds of years and why and when it somehow became the Spanish Inquisition"
I'm curious about your opinion on this episode
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/16/open-thread-156-25/
I don't trust the Democrats, the Republicans, or the media to tell me what the science says.
As Andrew Revkin from the NYT's has said climate change support is a "mile wide and an inch deep". A big problem is that the media messaging gatekeepers are almost entirely made up of environmental activists at this point which results in a rather one sided storytelling exercise that borders on outright propaganda. Does anyone actually read this stuff anymore? It's become a big game of apocalypse topper. If you want to know what the "scientists say" about climate then you better read their actual words, and not what the media is telling you they are saying. Most people don't have time for this but it is astonishing how distorted most media sources have become.
This also ignores the possibility that the scientists could be correct on many aspects within their expertise and that the optimal solution for society overall is to still effectively do nothing or wait and see once economic and other perspectives are taken into account.
For example it doesn't make sense to build a 20 foot sea wall today given a 1 in 10,000 chance that it may be needed in 100 years when we can just wait and see if that type of extreme outcome starts to develop. Alternately if you are building a sea wall today that is expected to last over 50 years it would be wise to plan for 1M of sea level rise if the delta cost for that additional height is not burdensome.
I think there are some increasingly viable solutions, but what I see is what I call "blank check syndrome". If only society would believe what the scientists say then it automatically follows that any level of sacrifice and cost can be brought to bear on the problem by the same activists who amplified the problem. This is only a necessary precondition to taking action and climate activists are the very last people on earth I want tasked with fixing it.
Unfortunately the religious factions are winning, so can't ignore them. CA is in an all out war on carbon free energy. We're shutting down nuclear, shutting down hydro plants, even shutting down wind. The world bank is denying loans to 3rd world countries living on a fraction of Western energy levels.
Until there is a faction that radically distinguishes itself from the anti-human catastophisers, I cannot support the progressive position on climate at this stage.
The religious factions aren't winning, they're just really loud and Democrats like to pander to them for votes. But fortunately, these people are mostly concerned with rhetoric, not outcomes, it's relatively easy to say all the words they wanna hear but do something else. The closure of Diablo Canyon is disappointing. I do think California has a particularly strong degrowth narrative, but I think that's because you have to live in a place with a near-perfect climate to delude yourself into believing that using as little energy as possible is ideal. So I actually think degrowth is uniquely influential in California and won't scale to other places. Even here, it's still kinda fringe. Most people I know want economic growth. When you tell people that desalination plants are a thing we could build, almost everybody is excited. And I live in SF, allegedly the most progressive place in the world.
Biden is pro-nuke. There's money for nukes in his climate bill. Kamala Harris is pro-economic growth (https://twitter.com/KamalaHarris/status/1423426343199547395). Mainstream Democrat pundits like Matt Yglesias regularly call out anti-nuclear environmental groups like Sierra Club and Sunrise Movement as "fake environmental groups." (https://www.slowboring.com/p/climate-left) The IPCC is pro-nuke and pro-carbon capture.
It seems like a common quality of ideologies on the far-left to act as if everyone on the left supports your obvious position, whether it's defunding the police or degrowth. They seem to think this is persuasive, and maybe it is persuasive to, like, really anxious people and maybe they're just selecting for really anxious people. Right wing news organizations, though, take this and run with it: they also want to make the fringe look like the center because that bolsters their case that the left is crazy.
I still haven't seen a good argument for the paradigm of infinite growth.
Not much to add, just had to comment for a +1
Do you mean that you want someone to make the case for you that releasing carbon into the atmosphere is bad? Or do you already buy these arguments rationally, but you still need to convince your gut that it is true?
A more interesting question is to show that your average US citizen should care about CO2 emissions, without resorting to hyperboles like "hurricane X only happened because of climate change" or "America will be overrun by climate refugees if we don't act". Personally I'm convinced that CO2 leads to higher temperatures and increases the odds of bad climate effects by a small margin, but not convinced that trying to mitigate CO2 is better than trying to mitigate the impacts of high CO2 instead.
For many of the impacts there are no mitigants (e.g. ecosystem collapse, poisoned oceans) or the costs to mitigate are way beyond costs of prevention ( depopulating area vs changing power generation)
this is why climate change is such a major issue, if the science is true there is no effective hedge on the risks and costs
Unfortunately groups previously denying climate change have now started to introduce this mitigate argument - a cynic would suggest it’s a bad faith strategy to delay meaningful government action
Or perhaps a good faith effort to avoid doing really stupid things (from their perspective) in the pursuit of solving climate change that either fail to make a difference or cause similarly bad results even if successful. Spending $10 trillion dollars in the US alone may or may not be a good idea if it's successful. Spending any non-negligible amount is a bad idea if it isn't even going to succeed.
One of the major issues I have with the options most often supported as an alternative (wind and solar) is that they are not scalable to the levels we would need to replace all carbon based power. That's doubly true for transportation, but certainly true for both residential and industrial power loads. Spending $10 trillion on getting wind and solar up to speed with current technology will fail, and be really really expensive while we're at it.
> Spending $10 trillion on getting wind and solar up to speed with current technology will fail, and be really really expensive while we're at it.
This confirms with my priors, so I want to believe it, but what's the data and argument behind it?
Based on current technology, it would take about 20,000 square miles of high sunlight land to power the United States with solar power. That's approaching the size of the entire state of West Virginia. That also assumes that power storage and transfer are not an issue, which of course they are significant issues.
20,000 square miles of solar panels would also be insanely resource-intensive, both in the sense of normal materials for not just the panels, but also in the form of rare earth metals and other limited resources. I'm not sure we could even find and mine enough of those materials to produce 20,000 square miles of panels, especially in the timeframe of 10-30 years many environmentalists talk about for zero emissions. That would also cover the US alone. Some countries would struggle with such a plan due to lack of sunshine and building capacity.
Wind is less land intensive, but they are also quite large and expensive. It would take well over a million wind turbines to power the US. We currently have 57,000 after quite a few years building them. Looking at places in Texas where they are widespread, I can't imagine what the world would look like with 1.2 million more of them. Again, that's just for the US.
Both of these things are difficult enough on their own, but they do not account for storage and transmission, especially to parts of the country that do not get enough wind or sunlight to make them anywhere near as economical as the ideal conditions might suggest.
Try eating a mouthful of it.
Lol!
You could start by walking everywhere you go, using no climate control, growing your own local food so we don't have use those pesky trucks to transport things, and so on. It might not end well if your local crop fails. You can examine the way the world was before humans started exploiting stored energy reserves and honestly ask yourself if that is the world you would prefer to live in. If so, fine. You can still choose to live that way today.
This type of question makes no sense. One has to actually examine both sides of the ledger and the side for "improvements to the human condition" is rather lengthy and compelling. Can we do this in a smarter way now that we know their are previously hidden costs? Absolutely. Are we suggesting that people in the 1700's shouldn't have exploited these reserves to make their lives better? Absolutely not.
I'm curious about companies like Climeworks (although there probably are no other companies like Climeworks). It seems like they take carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in rocks -- but isn't there some better way to use it ? I understand that sequestering carbon is the most efficient way tor reduce its concentration over time; but, on the other hand, it seems like they'd have a much higher rate of adoption if they could actually sell something useful on the output end.
It seems like they’re basically undoing the coal -> CO2 process, so there's nothing they can offer that coal can’t for much cheaper. There are environmentally friendly ways to use carbon (carbon nanotubes are something I’ve vaguely heard of) but we could also just use coal.
In order to capture the CO2 that results from burning coal, you have to install massively expensive and complicated equipment at the plant itself. In most cases, this would make the coal plant uneconomic compared to just about any other power source (including brand-new renewables), so in practice it hardly ever happens. A good case study here is the Kemper Project, which was supposed to be the first-ever coal plant built with carbon capture from the ground up; it's been under construction forever and went like 3x over budget.
There are in fact other companies like Climeworks (albeit not that many) - Google around for Direct Air Capture.
CO2 has many industrial applications (e.g. carbonation in soft drinks) and Climeworks does sell some of the CO2 it captures. The issue is that, as mentioned above, it costs Climeworks about $1000 to produce 1 ton of CO2, but the market price is about $40.
Am I the only one extremely disappointed that leaf blowers didn't make the cut?
No, you are far from alone. It seems like we'll have to implement the Butlerian Jihad against leaf blowers without Scott's help. Stay strong, brother !
Yeah, leaf blowers suck! (Or not. But they're really annoyingly loud and polluting, just not particularly bad for CO2.)
Is that a giant leaf blower or a tiny SO?
Hah, I wish there was a like button!
Technically, leaf blowers blow.
I giggled at this
There's no blowing without an equal amount of suck.
Love the feeling of aerosols of liquid hydrocarbons against my alveoli in the morning
You aren't kidding. Working from home during the pandemic, I was subjected to the sound of all my neighbors' lawn-mowing, leaf-blowing, hedge-trimming, and weed-whacking activities. Some days it sounded like there was frickin' dirt bike rally going on down the block.
The source on leafblowers did though - source 9.
Not sure if I'm completely convinced about my reasoning here, but I think conditional on the fact you are relatively bright, relatively well of, and care about this stuff, and conditional on it mattering, having one extra child might will actually have a negative carbon impact.
Someone has to invent the technologies that will reduce global carbon output, and I think my child is disproportionately likely to be that someone (obviously very unlikely in absolute terms, but still potentially positive in expectation)
It's possible that the type of person who decides not to have a child primarily for environmental reasons would have kids with expected negative net carbon impact, yes. However, not having a child (and e.g. choosing to adopt) is also a valuable social signal that might help them persuade others to take climate change more seriously, so the total calculation seems like it could go either way.
Also, I'm not so sure I would want to be the child of a parent who was on the fence about having me, but decided to because I was in expectation net negative carbon. That'd feel especially bad in the context of the expected offset being ~$1k.
> That'd feel especially bad in the context of the expected offset being ~$1k.
The point is valid, but it is ~$1k per year, so (disregarding changes in life expectancy over the next century) it's more like $80k.
Is there enough time left to raise a child, educate them as a scientist, and wait for them to invent something? I've recently been hearing environmentalists saying we need to cut emissions in half by 2030 and to net-zero by 2050, or something along those lines. I'm not sure how exactly they arrive at those dates, but they give me the impression that if you wanted to fix the problem by having kids and training them to fix it for you, you should have started on that before now.
That's one of the frustrations that I, and many others, have had about dates supplied by environmentalists. They are always about 10 years away, with catastrophe closer to 30 years. I'm old enough to have heard the same 10 and even 30 year predictions 30 years ago. That doesn't mean that we should go ahead and pollute and destroy the world, but it does mean that it's very very difficult to make any meaningful long term plans and also difficult to take further predictions seriously.
It's like a "prophet" predicting the return of Jesus eight different times, and so far all of them are wrong. Who would continue listening to that prophet? How many people, upon hearing that the prediction was wrong, would begin to doubt the underlying concern at all?
My experience over the past 10 years has been of seeing predictions fulfilled. I don’t have anything rigorous, but my memory of climate change predictions 10 years ago for 2020 was that they were for a slightly warmer climate and increase in frequency of extreme weather events, which sounds about right to me. I think a lot of what people focused on for 2020 was if we hadn’t started making progress by then it would increase the necessary speed of change to avoid catastrophe in 2050 and 2100, which I think are the years I’ve seen predictions of sea level rise for my whole life.
I remember a lot of talk about how the new records hit on multiple years around 2010 were just the result of "the pause" and then random noise added on it.
Looking back, that was pretty wrong.
I've seen most of the scientific arguments against warming fail, even some I used to make. The *methods* argued for mitigation may be wrong (nuclear power, please!) and the advocates may be chicken-littles who scream too much, but my money is way into the camp of it being true, and now we need to deal with it in the right way.
You may even be able to argue this for people who are not well off, or even all that bright or climate-conscious (though if that's the case you're not considering this to begin with). The problem is we can't quantify the likelihood of a given baby eventually contributing to these solutions; but I'd expect it to increase with the total number (or percentage) of future educated people.
It's not even necessary that they invent carbon-reducing technology themselves for having a child to have a positive carbon impact. They can contribute to the invention and production of carbon-reducing technology indirectly -- for example, by teaching people who work on it, or even just by positively contributing to the economy, freeing up other people to work on the technology.
Came to make a similar point; if you are someone who really cares about these things (vegetarian, use renewable energy, rarely fly/drive, etc etc) the carbon impact of your child will be much lower than the average (and we know that individuals' impacts can vary dramatically even within a first world lifestyle context, see e.g. Sweden and USA).
On a fuzzier point, ceding the long term culture to those who don't think the future is important seems like a long term losing proposition...
"Keep heat 2F warmer in winter"
I think you mean cooler.
Even within this framework, the "one less child number" makes zero sense.
Forget the child has a child has a child, let's just treat the child as one additional human.
If just the meat a human consumes counts as 3000lb/yr, then how can *everything* an additional human consumes count as less?
The argument seems to be something like "while that child is 4 yrs old, this is how much additional carbon it adds". And while I'm willing to stipulate, for the sake of argument (though I think it's a bad argument) that we won't consider the indefinite future progeny of our child, I'm not willing to stipulate that we pretend it will stay at the consumption level of a 4yr old forever.
See source 25 for the discussion of this question.
Why are you reading this site if you are uninterested in *rational* *analysis* of issues?
Aren’t there enough other places on the internet, and real life, where you can go to engage in mindless tribalism?
None of which seems especially germane to dismissing my technical question with a straw man argument that I never made…
I saw that. I'm just saying it makes no sense. Even if you don't want to track the cost of the future children, the calculation is for the cost of a CHILD, as though we're all going to pretend that children never grow up and become adults.
I do not consider this a reasonable good faith estimate.
I thought the fairest way to do this was to give the carbon cost for an actual child, but as I said in section 25, by the time the child is older, overall carbon use will probably be much lower, and the cost of offsets per ton will be much lower, to the point where I think these numbers are still somewhere in the ballpark of correct even then.
I guess that's where we differ, in the strength of our convictions as to those future carbon numbers being "much lower".
I've been hearing that story for 30 yrs now. They have fallen, yes. Have they fallen enough to invalidate my point? Not if we had done the calculation 30 or 20 yrs ago.
Will the next 30 yrs be different? Hmm.
Is the reason for name99's sniff test failing that you're amortizing 20 years of a child over 80 years of one's life? I think you imply that in the footnote? Not totally unreasonable, but at least unintuitive. "switch to a Tesla" is per year of Tesla ownership, not the Tesla benefit over the lifetime of the Tesla spread out over the owners whole life (which would reduce it).
I don't think the right strategy is totally obvious, but I'm not sure I'm a fan of yours? When I see "have one fewer child" I think I assume total child lifespan divided by my lifespan. Keeping that denominator but switching the numerator to "while the child is still at home" is a bit confusing.
Edit: but as you say this is all order of magnitude anyway so reading that closely probably misses the point
I think a more rational way to do this is to look at population growth. If population is shrinking, you won't add CO2 to the current status quo by having an extra child. But once population is growing, assume you are adding the average CO2 usage over a persons life to the equation.
Only issue with this is that in 30 years the average adult might use far less CO2 due to new technologies. So this seems very hard to estimate.
If I'm reading this correctly, it would cost somewhere between $540M and $36B every year to offset carbon output for the world. Thats somewhere between 0.6% and 45% of world GDP annually to maintain the status quo. Feels like that is an unsustainable practice, both in terms of total investment and running out of space to plant trees. Isn't reducing overall carbon output a higher ROI?
It's ~$500 billion to $36 trillion dollars (I think you're missing three orders of magnitude). But that's just the current marginal cost of offsetting multiplied by the total carbon, and, as he says, the cost only scales so far, so it's not really representative of the total cost to actually solve the problem in its entirety.
I think you're missing a block of zeroes - it's between $540B and $36T (although you got the percent GDP right).
I think there are a few roles for offsetting (although I wouldn't want to have to offset the entire world economy):
- Even if we stopped emitting carbon tomorrow, a lot of existing carbon would stay in the atmosphere and keep temperatures high. We need to do something about it.
- Even if you and your country stopped emitting carbon tomorrow, lots of other people and countries probably wouldn't, and sometimes (eg the developing world) it might seem kind of unfair to force them. We might need developed countries to address somewhat more than 100% of the carbon they're currently emitting, which can't be done without offsets.
- Realistically we can't scale either reduced-emissions OR offsets up fast enough to prevent disaster, and we'll have to work with both. I would love to have the option to put global warming 100% on hold and tread water for just 0.6% of world GDP per year, it would give us a lot more time to do the other stuff (I don't think offsets will ever be anywhere near this level, but I would still love it).
I'm a huge fan of this kind of information, even if it's partly speculative--thank you!
I've recently decided that climate change is the issue I want my donation budget to go to, but have been unsure where to go from there, because the place I used to go for guidance about where to donate (GiveWell) doesn't have any recommended charities for climate change. So I was glad to get a few recommendations for organizations to donate to. I'm very much looking forward to future posts on climate change stuff!
Tbh I'm commenting primarily to say that I'm a big fan of your profile pic ;)
but I am also curious as to why you've decided to direct your money to work on climate change. Were there any people/activists/books/studies in particular that have moved you to do so?
Thanks!
I can't point to any sources that convinced me, unfortunately; I'm not sure what changed my thinking. The people I trusted to guide me before (see: GiveWell) argue against me here--mainly because they aren't very hopeful that any one individual's donations can do much good.
I'm just convinced that the negative effects of climate change will be significantly bad for human beings. And look, if a species goes (actually) extinct, it's extinct forever. If an ecosystem loses enough of its keystone species to cease to function, those ecosystems are gone forever, so that even if we could reverse kinds of damage later on, you'd still be left with a permanently (within a human time-scale) ecologically impoverished planet.
Given the long-term time scale of the problems caused by climate change, I'd rather devote what little I have to that than to solving short-term problems involving a bunch of humans suffering and dying right now, as much as I do also worry about the humans suffering and dying right now. I'm just a lot more worried about the fact that we're screwing up the world that *all* future humans will have to live in. All is a lot.
I've been researching this issue myself - there are two sources which seem to repeatedly come up when it comes to Effective Altruism-style evaluations of climate charities:
FoundersPledge Climate Change Cause Area Report: https://founderspledge.com/research/fp-climate-change
Vox Future Perfect Evaluation of Climate Charities: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/12/2/20976180/climate-change-best-charities-effective-philanthropy
Both agree that the Coalition for Rainforest Nations and the Clean Air Task Force are among the most effective, although there are several other options.
Thanks for the recommendations! I'll look at those.
This founders pledge research is outdated - they ni longer recommend coalition for rainforest nations
Here's the Effective Environmentalism facebook group, where you could potentially get more perspectives on this topic: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1509936222639432
You could donate to the Founder's Pledge Climate Change Fund through EA Funds https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/donate/organizations
I haven't looked in to these charities myself, but RC Forward has identified some more climate change organizations (Carbon180, Cool Earth, TerraPraxis - https://rcforward.org/donate/#environmental) that meet at least one of these criteria, according to RC Forward:
"""
The charity currently is or recently was recommended by a well-respected, unbiased, evidence-based charity evaluator, for example GiveWell or Animal Charity Evaluators.
The charity has been identified by a third-party expert in the charitable sector as implementing extremely cost-effective interventions in its particular cause area.
The charity is itself a well-respected, evidence-based charity evaluator or incubator.
The charity serves to educate and build a community around concepts like high-impact and cost-effective charity.
The charity’s intervention is as of yet unproven, though evidence reviewed by the experts mentioned above suggests the intervention is especially promising.
"""
(https://rcforward.org/faq/)
I think CoolEarth used to be more recommended in the effective altruism community, and then it seemed to fade away in the discourse. I don't recall if there's any particular reason why.
Thanks for the recommendations!
On why Cool Earth is no longer highly rated in the Effective Altruism community: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RnmZ62kuuC8XzeTBq/why-we-have-over-rated-cool-earth
> This post tries to quantify how much carbon is produced by various activities, lifestyle changes, and actors.
The answer to this is really simple. Unless you are talking about technologies not yet invented involving nuclear fusion and similar, the answer is simple: not one of them produces carbon.
Yes, I'm a nerd, and very fond of precision. Carbon dioxide is not the same thing as carbon, and when I read discussion of greenhouse gas emissions that carelessly conflate the two, my reaction is not to expect precision anywhere else. At the very least, the only greenhouse gas acknowledged will be "carbon", and the only unfortunate side effect of releasing carbon dioxide acknowledged will be its role as a greenhouse gas.
You, Scott, almost certainly know better. (Your professional qualifications pretty much require you to have passed college chemistry.) I'm not sure whether you are trying to write in a simple form for the generally clueless - not your usual practice - or what. Indeed, your table correctly says "LBs CO2" rather than referring to "carbon". Maybe you are trying to signal what you say explicitly a little later:
> I can’t stress enough how approximate and unreliable these numbers are. The reason I made this chart and other people didn’t isn’t because I’m smarter or harder-working than they are. It’s because I’m less responsible, and more willing to use numbers that are kind of grounded in wild guesses, and technically shouldn’t be compared to each other.
Nonetheless, I wish you'd be a bit more careful, rather than giving the impression you aren't competent to understand the sources you cite.
Probably doesn't hurt to be more precise, but I think "carbon" actually might be better if understood as "carbon species", because CO2 isn't the only greenhouse gas we care about. Other gasses tend to be converted to equivalent CO2, as Scott discusses, but not specifically saying "CO2" is more accurate, even if less precise (as long as it isn't interpreted as pure carbon, which doesn't seem like a necessary interpretation).
I think your policy is pedantic past the point of helpfulness.
But see, he's actually the best at being no fun, and if we actually want to do something useful to slow climate change, we are necessarily on Team No Fun. Giving up fun things is part of what's actually necessary to reduce the absolute quantity of greenhouse gas emissions. Harleys are fun. Flying to Cancun is fun. I tried an Impossible Burger the other day for the first time. It was more expensive and less tasty than a regular hamburger. Capitalism is happy to offer the Impossible Burger to guilt-ridden liberals but woe betide you if you try to take the regular hamburger away.
Maybe going the other direction is a better plan - make elk burgers and bison burgers The burger to enjoy, more expensive but potentially more tasty, and develop some social cachet such that one elk burger has enough glow to last three months. Get everybody going to the Cabela's cafe. Those bison jerky granola bar things are even for sale in *gas stations* now - it is mainstreaming.
Counter-pedantry: "Produced" doesn't just mean "created." If those activities cause more carbon to be brought forth and released into the atmosphere it's reasonable to say that they produce that carbon, even if the carbon existed in some form beforehand.
Huh. I guess iron mines don’t produce iron... whooaaaa ... and desalination plants don’t produce water? And businesses don’t produce money ...
Produce, in economics, refers to either providing or transforming into some usable form. Not chemical synthesis. This isn’t even pedantry it’s just wrong. Just not what the term means in the relevant field.
I think it comes from thinking about the carbon cycle by ecologists, because the carbon atoms go all over the place, but they're only present as CO2 molecules in the atmosphere. For example, only the C in the "CO2" emitted by fossil fuel combustion is new to the atmosphere, the two O atoms came from the atmosphere in the first place. Similarly, when "CO2" is removed from the atmosphere by green plants, roughly speaking only the C atom and one O atom is removed, the other O atom returns immediately as water. There's a bunch of H atoms that shuffled around, too.
If you are going to be pedantic, you could at least be criticizing the table for saying CO2 rather than CO2e, which is what is actually shown for many of the items, per the notes.
In any case, when things such as sequestration are considered (see Amazon (the Rainforest) on the table), we are considering Carbon, C, and converting it to assumed sequestered CO2.
Overall, you comment doesn't make you come off as a 'nerd' (at least in this domain) or fond of precision.
For Australians in the comments, I recommend GreenFleet for carbon offsets. I looked into their annual reports, back calculated how much carbon is locked up in a tree etc. and it seemed pretty legit to me. After this investigation, an environmental economist I know (who worked on the Daintree rainforest reclamation scheme) confirmed that he had been using the service for years. I’ve personally offset 10 years of my family’s emissions, planning to do another 10 years come tax time. Costs are good ($15/t AUD) and it’s easy. The basic practice is re-foresting workable, but marginally productive agricultural land (hobby farms mostly used for low profit livestock).
I personally struggle a bit with the non-tangible side of donating to political change charities, so was very happy to find this option. Also, i apologise for how much of an ad this seems like, I promise I’m not affiliated in any way.
Footnote 9 probably should be [removed]?
Sometimes Scott makes me think of this guy. I should say I mean this in the kindest most complimentary way. :)
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theonion.com/freak-actually-knows-how-big-an-acre-is-1847253085/amp
It's a tenth of a square furlong. Everyone knows that.
Learning that there 4 pecks in bushel was part of my primary school education.
"What's a peck?"
"A quick smooch."
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1986/02/03
Or an alternate definition:
What a passionate open mouthed soul kiss becomes after a few decades of marriage. :)
But what that peck lacks in heat it more than makes up for in lasting joy.
Mowing a half-acre lot with a push mower every summer Saturday as a teenager will fix that unit in your mind pretty well. Incidentally, not a chore that's amenable to electrification. It's hard to finish all of my considerably smaller yard on 10 Ah worth of lithium-ion batteries, though an electric mower is much more pleasant to use and I don't mind breaking the chore up into two parts. The energy density of fossil fuels is just too goddamn useful for our own good.
Those batteries keep getting better. I saw a lot of battery powered snowblowers in my neighborhood last winter. The batteries seem to hold up surprisingly well. My neighbor is a construction carpenter and uses his on three lots with a single charge.
Speaking as a former powertrain software engineer in the auto industry, I found it really interesting to see how much less polluting per fuel consumption my V8 full size truck was vs my older, tiny commuter car for going to and from work. The commuter car is very close to 2/5 the size of the truck in engine displacement and pollutes more like 1/2 as much per mile. Now, in my case, the truck was in fact purchased to move things heavier than any car could move, so it wasn't a thing that could be replaced with a significantly less polluting vehicle. Additionally, I find it interesting that we don't actually discuss the fact that modern turbocharged engines have significantly higher particulate emissions (much worse for health) to reduce carbon emissions.
"how much less polluting per fuel consumption"
I don't understand this. What's the mileage you get per gallon of gas for the V8 truck vs. commuter car? Surely the truck has to be less fuel-efficient than the car purely by virtue of the difference in weight.
My immediate reaction given what you've described is to say that you've just provided a neat example of Jevons paradox, where efficiency gains in producing a given good through improvements in technology lead to increased consumption of the good. In the aggregate, the very impressive gains by the automotive industry in using a gallon of gasoline more efficiently over the past 40 years have been at least partially offset by a shift in the composition of the American fleet toward larger vehicles. I don't begrudge you the truck if you need a truck, but it's just this sort of dynamic in consumer behavior that makes collective action problems a real pisser and leads me to be skeptical of technological solutions to climate change.
The car gets like 27mpg combined, the truck like 17mpg combined as measured in real use and the EPA estimated carbon per mile is much worse than that comparison would suggest.
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=28539
vs
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=39602
Most of the difference there comes from catalytic converter improvements in terms of the difference between carbon emissions, since both are new enough to operate at pretty reliable stoichiometry. I think the real difference would be between the 2.7L turbo F150's fuel consumption and an older, less efficient large sedan, since I've seen people go from one to the other when buying a new car.
I would actually argue that the regulatory requirements for safety features and fuel economy/emissions have driven the cost of a vehicle up to the point that people are often preferring to keep older, less efficient/more polluting vehicles on the road out of affordability concerns, often causing more pollution on miles driven, though likely not on total cost since new builds cause a lot of emissions during production. Still, we're not likely at a local or global optimum on that pareto chart.
We'd do much better in America to switch to the European model of "liters to go 100km" model. But for us I guess it would be "gallons to go 100 miles."
It makes clear that there are some really important reasons to go from 15mpg to 25mpg when you instead see it as "6.7" going down to "4.0".
Once you hit 4 gallons-to-go-100-miles, the marginal improvements become much harder. 40mpg to 50 mpg sounds impressive, but expressed as going just from "2.5" to "2.0" and you can realize it's just saving 50 total gallons of gas a year, and you can probably save that carbon elsewhere much easier.
We'd do best to get just the *worst* things off the road, and then worry about something else instead.
I'm old-fashioned enough that I'm still much more concerned about smog/particulates than I am about CO2. But I live in a place (Utah) where the air quality suffers a great deal just due to atmospheric effects: we're downwind from California, so fires/smog float this way, and we're in a basin prone to inversions much of the year, so smog accumulates.
I'm mildly skeptical about CO2 and climate change. I know, I know. I think more CO2 dumped in the atmosphere can indeed make the planet warmer, but I don't think our understanding of the climate is all that good, and I don't think the conclusions made from climate prognostications about what is to be done are all that wise. But I've got no skepticism at all about particulate pollution. It's definitely bad, and I'm glad we've taken action to make it better.
There's more to do, of course. Electrification of a lot of our transport will help a lot, and it ought to make everyone happier about the atmosphere in the long run.
Electrification is surprisingly less effective than you might think -- much of the particulate emissions from vehicles comes from tires and brakes ablating and there's good arguments that the overall higher average weight of an EV does more ablation at least in tires than you save from regenerative braking. Moral of the story being that everything has a tradeoff and it's not always clear that the regulatory bright line is anywhere near the optimum.
The Eeyore's who work in Air Quality are some of the worst people I've had to spend time with.
"...and so we achieve a net reduction of CO2 as well as substantial reductions in NOx, combined with a redistribution of emissions to areas of lower population density"
AQ Eeyore: "But the PM 2.5s and PM10s might get a bit worse, so maybe we should just do nothing"
I've found it to be the whole 'benefit-cost analysis missing from mental models' thing, across a substantial segment of a profession.
I know this is more complex than what you're going for but... I cringe when I see gas plants represented (and other gas-heavy activities) represented just in terms of CO2 and not accounting for methane emissions. Gas often gets misrepresented as cleaner than it really is and it's not good for the whole climate discourse.
Everything reported is in CO2 equivalents (in greenhouse effect), so if he did it right he should have accounted for this.
I don't think that's right. The post says CO2e is just for a few items (like beef), and the gas plant source looks like it's just CO2.
Great post.
The most important thing is to realize that we probably need to get to net negative, not net zero.
This means scaling carbon removal (direct air capture etc) to reduce the cost/unit from 100s - 1000s $/ton to 10 - 100 $/ton, where carbon seems to be priced, if it is priced at all.
Order of magnitude decreases in unit cost is something something China is (uniquely) good at, so the most effective thing is probably high carbon prices that create an incentive to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and (sneakily) let China steal IP of existing direct air capture devices to kickstart the manufacturing of carbon pullers at world scale.
How much does it cost to offset one pair of disposable chopsticks, as opposed to washing reusable ones? My ex roommate criticized me for this.
Those come from wood, so just transportation costs?
Disposable chopsticks have a negative carbon footprint, as they contain carbon sequestered from the atmosphere.
That depends on production, transportation costs (including packaging) and how long is till decomposition.
I think that calculating those indirect effects is generally problematic, because we have no way of knowing what would have happened to the carbon released in their production and transport if the chopsticks in question had not been produced. I'm guessing that most of it would have been released anyway, so that those effects are negligible compared to the carbon captured in the wood, but that's just my guess.
This is great, thank you!
I don't think that planting trees or the Amazon rainforest really acts as a carbon sink, at least in the sense of removing some amount of CO2 from the atmosphere every year. To take carbon from the air, it has to be converted to some other state and stored. In the case of a forest, it's in the form of plant material (wood, etc). But forests can only grow so large, and then the decaying (or burning) plants release all the stored carbon back into the air. The only carbon that is more permanently removed must be sequestered like with fossil fuels, but this process takes millions of years (and might not even occur at all with modern microorganisms), so the amount per year is insignificant.
If the Amazon is actively locking in more carbon right now, it's just because the fires cleared out prime growing space and now the trees can grow back to fill that space, which brings it back to the same carbon storage level as before. But over the natural cycle of burning and regrowth, everything probably ends up around equal. There's temporary benefits to planting trees but I'm not sure it's really significant on a global scale, especially when planted in places that may be cleared or burned again in the near future.
It might actually be more of a sustainable carbon sink to continuously harvest forests and sequester the wood, allowing new forest growth to occur. Building houses seems to keep the wood intact for at least a few decades. Turning the wood to charcoal (and storing instead of burning the charcoal) would be more permanent.
Peat bogs actually do remove some amount of co2 per year from air, and correspondingly do in mass yearly. But forests don’t seem to, and a bunch of news headlines (reliable science journalism!!) claim that the Amazon isn’t sinking much carbon.
It seems to me that a forest, left to its own devices, wouldn't produce or remove much in the way of CO2 on net. But destroying the forest produces CO2 and letting it grow back consumes CO2. We want more wood to exist, because whatever carbon is in the wood isn't in the air.
> But forests don’t seem to
Most forests have trees with capacity to grow larger and many forests can accumulate carbon in soil - but right now trees are cut down before reaching full size
And anyway increasing forest area would lock some carbon.
> I don't think that planting trees or the Amazon rainforest really acts as a carbon sink, at least in the sense of removing some amount of CO2 from the atmosphere every year.
It will as long as trees are getting bigger. Not sure how long trees need to grow to reach stable state in Amazon rainforest.
AFAIK Amazon rainforest is pretty bad at accumulating humus in soil, but still I expect trees to be growing at least for several years.
I think my point is that the release of CO2 comes from taking fossil fuels and burning them, and growing trees does not really offset this because a tree is not the equivalent of a fossil fuel. Trees take valuable land and can be burnt easily through wildfires, and it doesn't scale to create more forests indefinitely. It becomes more expensive the more forests that you have, because suitable land runs out.
For it to really be an equivalent offset, you would need to do the opposite of burning fossil fuels, which is to turn carbon back into fuel and bury it, by burying wood or charcoal for instance. You can't really cancel out your carbon emissions that come from burning fossils fuel just by saving forests, that's just kicking the can down the road a bit.
> It becomes more expensive the more forests that you have, because suitable land runs out.
Yes, in other words multiplying current offset price by total emissions is not a good way to calculate total costs to mitigate emissions. But right now it is fairly effective.
> growing trees does not really offset this because a tree is not the equivalent of a fossil fuel
But growing forest and keeping it indefinitely is. Note that growing forests is a good idea anyway (erosion, flooding control) and it is possible to extract steady stream of resources from a grown forest without destroying ut.
Having more forest is certainly better than nothing, but I would guess it's just a tiny fraction compared to the burning of fossil fuels, and even if we covered every possible part of the planet with as much forest as we could, it wouldn't make up for the burning of fossil fuels that we do, because that comes from millions of years of plants.
And, purely looking at the carbon capture instead of the other benefits, I would suspect that trying to systematically harvest the wood and sequester it would capture more carbon than simply keeping a forest indefinitely. We should also leave plenty of natural forests for the other benefits, but if we want to be serious about CO2, we should analyze any potential solutions properly.
1) "even if we covered every possible part of the planet" - yes, but it is not a valid reason to ignore that we can plant forest on massive scale, benefit from it anyway and capture some CO2
2) "more carbon than simply keeping a forest indefinitely" - to do this one needs to have a mature forest in the first place, so it is not in any way opposed (and typical forest will be used to produce wooden products, many of them locking C02 for decades and being an alternative to plastics etc)
OK, it doesn't sound like we're really disagreeing that much. Just that here in California, we let the forests grow a lot, and now they say the forests are too thick so they burn like crazy, releasing all that carbon back into the air. I think we should focus more on logging and tree burial rather than leaving them untouched.
Planting new forests also means denying people potential farmland and living space, which is a really difficult sell. I think forests are just a small part of the solution. And people really shouldn't think that saving forests absolves them of their fossil fuel use.
So, sequestering carbon as wood -- whether that's in structures or just buried deep underground -- implies also sequestering the other elements that make up wood. Is there enough bio-available phosphorus in the world for wood to become the major storage form of the carbon we'd prefer not be in the atmosphere or ocean.
The "humus" paradigm is apparently on shaky ground: https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-soil-science-revolution-upends-plans-to-fight-climate-change-20210727/
Quanta is usually good for the areas I'm familiar with so I'm inclined to trust them on this. If they're right then this is a serious problem for climate models.
Thanks, that is very interesting!
And hilariously my misunderstanding of what "humus" means resulted - by accident - in having view matching reality. I was not expecting inactive carbon bing stored in soil for centuries.
Actually I believe even mature forests are net carbon sinks, for two reasons: leaf and twig litter falls to the ground, and depending significantly on the climatic zone, over time builds a very thick layer of soil enriched with organic compounds. In temperate zones this layer can reach tens or even hundreds of meters thick -- we might think of it as a sort of proto-peat -- if it were buried by vulcanism, it might form a layer of coal over 100 million years. Secondly, and relatedly, the tree rootlets interact in subtle ways with bacteria and other tiny organisms in the soil, sending out sugars (made by photosynthesis) that the bacteria eat and convert to their own biomass. The bacteria die and decay and also form part of the organic component of the forest soil.
This is true over the timescale of millions of years, but in the next century that we're concerned with, then I doubt that the total contribution is significant. Though we certainly shouldn't be burning any sort of giant peat layer that we don't need to be touching.
I believe that decomposition generally involves the carbon from plant material being converted to CO2, almost entirely. Left naturally, only a small amount will avoid decomposition and be sequestered into the Earth. Bacteria are usually generating CO2 as they consume the plant matter, as the ones doing most of the decomposition.
If we bury the logs ourselves, we can cause a much larger amount of the plant matter to avoid decomposition. Though we'd have to find a way to do this that is sustainable too.
Actually, no, the sequestration has been measured, and it is quite significant[1]. No, the decomposition of most of the plant matter a tree produces over its lifetime (which are the zillions of leaves it makes every year and then discards) does not immediately return to the atmosphere. This is easily demonstrated! Go into any old growth forest and start digging. Stop when you hit bedrock, or a purely inorganic layer, e.g. a layer of clay. But bring a lunch, you'll be there a while. What you're seeing is essentially the way coal formed in the first place 300 million years ago. It's not a lot per acre -- but there are a lot of acres of forest.
---------------------
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature07276 Note the estimate in the abstract that old-growth forests sequester 1.3 Gt of carbon/year. US CO2 emissions are estimated by the EPA to be about 6.5 Gt/year, so this is hardly an insignificant amount.
I found this source claiming the opposite: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210325150055.htm
I can't say for sure which sources are the most accurate. I don't think your example is particularly valid because digging in an old growth forest would be potentially digging through millions of years of accumulated forest matter. To measure how much carbon is sequestered per year, you'd have to instead see how much that mass actually increases over a year, which would probably be rather difficult to accurately measure. Though you can also consider that if X tons of carbon are sequestered every year, then after millions of years there would be X * million tons. Aside from underground fires or other destructive things I suppose.
After you spend 30 seconds googling you should spend another few minutes reading the actual paper. Then you'd find this:
"The climate mitigation effect of unmanaged forests with trees more than 200 years old is estimated to be at least one-third too high."
One-third too high doesn't change my argument in any important way, and it certainly does not lead to the *opposite* conclusion. It's a footnote, at most.
No, you would not be digging through millions of years of forest. Come on. There isn't a forest on the planet that's a *million* years old. At best a few thousand. If nothing else the Laurentide ice sheet only retreated from the temperate zones like 20,000 years ago or so.
The full quote is a bit less charitable: "The climate mitigation effect of unmanaged forests with trees more than 200 years old is estimated to be at least one-third too high -- and is based solely upon their own data, which, incidentally, is subject to great uncertainty. Thus, the basis for the article's conclusions is very problematic,"
And in the conclusion: "Old-growth forest plays a key role in biodiversity. However, from a long-term climate mitigation perspective, it isn't an effective tool. Grasping the nuance is important so that debate can be based upon scientifically substantiated assertions, and so that policy is not influenced on an incorrect basis."
I don't think it's inaccurate to say that the source claims the opposite: old growth forests do not sequester enough carbon to significantly help mitigate climate change.
Another 30 seconds googling shows some forests may be that old, but that's irrelevant. Even if the forest dies out, the buried material would mostly remain, and then eventually a new forest would appear above it. There have definitely been forests for millions of years, regardless of whether there's an unbroken line up until now.
I don't feel like you're arguing in particularly good faith so I don't have much interest in continuing to discuss things with you if you continue in the same style.
There needs to be a lot more discussion about the BENEFITS of global warming and the possibility that it could be a net GOOD.
Broke: Global warming hoax! Muh hockey stick graph! Georgia Guidestones prove the elites want you dead!!!
Woke: Climate emergency! Storms of muh grandchildren!
Bespoke: Global warming is real and is a near unalloyed good, increasing agricultural productivity through the fertilization effect, reducing droughts (a warmer planet is a wetter planet), and opening up trade routes & new resources. A planet that is 2-3C warmer will literally produce more food and be able to support a larger population.
Possibly, but change is bad. Slowing down change gives us time to adjust.
Also as a starting point, any time you take an incredibly complex system with lots of interacting processes and feedback loops massively altering one element very suddenly is unlikely to come to helpful
Whatever happened to "move fast and break things"?
it was great for a while but now all my things are broken
Depends on what kinds of externalities there are. If most costs are internalized, it's fine. And we have to permit pecunariary externalities to get anything done. But I was literally running around and breaking all of your stuff, that would understandably be considered a bad thing.
It rained in Greenland a few days ago. You know how when the temperature has been hanging around freezing for a week or two and the snow's melted and refrozen over the sidewalks a few times? The best thing to clear it out is a good rain when the temperature gets up to about 40 degrees because water has several times the heat capacity of air.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/climate/greenland-rain-ice-sheet.html
I'd suggest that you read up on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and think a bit about positive feedback loops.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/oceans/amoc
In the next thousand or so years we probably would want to deliberately heat the planet up a bit (or if the effect can be localized, warm up Siberia while perhaps cooling the equatorial Africa, say) because a lot of the planet is indeed cooler than what's optimal for human flourishing.
The problem is people, infrastructure and farms have been concentrated on areas that are broadly speaking optimal RIGHT NOW, and an increase in global temperatures makes most extant farms and extant people and extant infrastructure sorely misplaced (the same could be said about distribution of other species: areas that are tundra right now could be a host of much greater abundance of life in a warmer planet, but it takes time for plants and animals to migrate). They can relocate for sure, but since most of the warming is poised to happen during time span of decades and a few centuries, the short-term cost to society (either from enduring newly suboptimal climates or the costs of moving) is quite immense. Take for instance the areas currently irrigated by meltwater from Himalayan glaciers: that's the source of food for some 1.5B people and rather than packing up and leaving for greener pastures, it's not too unlikely nukes start flying as three nuclear-armed nations of the area start fighting over water use of the diminishing great rivers so vital to their populations.
There's a trillion dollar industry already trying to convince people that climate change isn't so bad. It's not exactly an unheard of position. Just a bad one
It's not. While there are some benefits - in some cases CO2 will enhance growing (although more frequently other limiting factors matter more), and unsurprisingly fewer people will freeze to death - the net result is overwhelmingly bad.
Maybe, but not right here and now.
>increasing agricultural productivity through the fertilization effect
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2016.00657/full
>Elevated CO2 generally causes reductions in stomatal density, stomatal conductance, leaf transpiration, and canopy/ecosystem evapotranspiration. (citations omitted)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CO2_fertilization_effect
>Net primary productivity (NPP) might positively respond to the carbon fertilization effect. Although, evidence shows that enhanced rates of photosynthesis in plants due to CO2 fertilization do not directly enhance all plant growth, and thus carbon storage.
>reducing droughts
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/7/25/india-monsoon-death-toll-hits-124-as-search-for-missing-continues
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/7/17/monsoon-floods-landslides-ravage-south-asia-at-least-221-dead
>opening up trade routes and resources
I don't even know how to address this. How? By flooding low-lying land?
This is a dumb take.
I pretty much agree with you, but "opening up trade routes" probably refers to the Arctic become more navigable.
Thanks. That makes sense.
Here's a book that considers this topic in detail (which, incidentally, is written by the brother of one of the creators of the internet, no less): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7230015-how-bad-are-bananas
I want to give a second recommendation for this, it really is an excellent book and strangely engrossing to read as well.
I came to the comment to recommend this book, and want to third the recommendation! And agree that it's remarkably readable for what it basically a list of items/activities and explanation of their carbon costs.
I’m not a fan of this is kind of analysis. What can one do with it? Adding up the discrete micro changes one might come to the conclusion that the cost of reducing CO is just not worth it.
We need an incentive working through the price system for decades to make everything just enough more or less expensive to produce really big changes. Personally, I suspect that fission energy could become cheap enough to power CO2 capture so than many fossil fuel combusting activities can continue. But who knows. Maybe best set of technologies win.
> What can one do with it?
What about Scott's suggestions in the post? Looks pretty actionable to me.
I agree with most of the recommendations but they do not turn on the calculations of the carbon content of different activities.
Funnily enough, I don't think it's quite coherent to care both about environmental disaster (and ensuing civilizational collapse) and rogue superintelligence: the first would prevent the second!
E.g. https://twitter.com/GoodVibesNoAI/status/1423769971382001664
If I think both have a 50% likelihood of happening, I want to do whatever I can to increase that 25% chance of survival. That’s probably caring about both, but it might be putting all your energy into one or the other.
Ah, but only AI is the lethal threat here. Civilizational collapse would be nasty, but I'm pretty sure humanity can tank it and bounce back, eventually.
I agree that civilizational collapse is better than human extinction, but it's still extremely bad.
If I have a 10% chance of dying from overheating and a 20% chance of dying from cold, the fact that of the two Co occurred it would cancel out doesn't negate the risks
It's not like that. It's 10% chance you get a fever bad enough it prevents you from getting on a flight, 20% chance that flight crashes.
Only one of the events can kill you, and the non-lethal event occurring prevents the lethal one.
This works only if you assume that you, personally, will not be killed by enviromental disaster.
No, in context, "you" means "life on the planet", not any individual. That is what I am highlighting in the OP, and I assume LondonPsychThrowaway was maintaining the frame.
And it's rather implausible to expect environmental disaster to end humanity, much less all life.
Further complicating the Bitcoin issue, I would say a better way to value a Bitcoin transaction is to ask how much the individual is willing to pay to make it, in other words, what is the transaction fee they pay? Due to the existence of bitcoin issuance in block rewards, transaction fees only make up about 10% of the total block reward over the past year (but fluctuating wildly, see https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html#3y). So perhaps the value given for Bitcoin should be 10x smaller.
Eating a cheeseburger is the equivalent of driving a normal car about 14 miles.
Walking 14 miles would burn more calories than a cheeseburger. Google says 100 calories per mile, so 14 miles = 1400 calories. That's maybe three cheeseburgers. So walking costs 3 times more carbon than driving.
Cycling seems to burn about half the calories of walking. So cycling costs 2 times more carbon than driving.
That's by distance. By time is different. If you cycle at 1/4 the speed you drive, then cycling costs only half the carbon of driving on a per minute basis.
Assuming a motorcycle costs only half the carbon of a car, motorcycling for a minute and riding a bicycle for a minute are equivalent.
But cycling for a mile is FOUR TIMES the carbon of motorcycling for that same mile!
Remember that Hyundai commercial a few years back where they were so proud everything in the commercial was done by human power (IIRC, they had a guy on a stationary bicycle producing energy to move a backdrop to simulate the car moving)? They probably produced several times as much carbon as if they just let the machines do it.
Of course, if you get your calories from beans rather than meat, it might be less carbon. The chart doesn't say.
I came to the comments specifically to see if anyone would bring this up. I wonder about this very thing every time riding a bike or taking the stairs is mentioned as a CO2 reducer.
Certainly having to ride a bike will make you travel shorter distances. And perhaps you were going to get equivalent exercise of some form regardless, so might as well make it useful. But putting cost(bike)=0 is probably too simple.
Do people in NYC eat more because of all the walking?
1) have you checked in-city commuting emissions? Fuel use is vastly higher per distance in traffic jams
2) bicycle infrastructure (vehicle, roads vs cycleways, parkings) is vastly cheaper, also in C02 equivalent
3) travel by bicycle heavily encourages limiting distance.
4) exercise via bicycle replaces other exercise (say at gym) that would consume similar amount of calories
5) exercise via bicycle increases health (what reduces needs for costly, also in Co2-equivalent medical interventions). And ironically increases C02 emissions via longer life.
The underlying assumption here is that people who do more exercise eat more calories as a result.
This might be true at the upper extreme, in that professional or other full time sportspeople do eat a lot more calories than people with sedentary jobs.
But the linkage between diet and exercise for regular people is much less robust. It may even be negatively correlated (people trying to lose weight eat less and exercise more, when they give up, they give up on both; I'm not claiming this is causal).
If it doesn't result in more calories of food being consumed, then the calculus is very different. And the linkages between food and exercise are much more complicated than the simplistic calories in, calories out analyses suggest.
"Walking 14 miles would burn more calories than a cheeseburger. Google says 100 calories per mile, so 14 miles = 1400 calories. That's maybe three cheeseburgers. So walking costs 3 times more carbon than driving."
Under the assumption that the person subsists entirely on cheeseburgers. This is a bad idea for more than climate reasons.
(Disclaimer: It’s hard to tell whether you’re being serious or just having fun playing Devil’s advocate, but I’m going to assume the former.)
Obviously there are far more efficient ways of feeding yourself than burgers that allow walking to easily surpass cars in carbon efficiency. Walking will also improve your health (provided a car driver doesn’t maim you), which is a nice positive externality that you might have sought out anyway. And if you do it often, you will quickly beat Google’s estimate and find that you can walk 14 miles without requiring any more food at all (that is, you get fit).
And cycling is probably an order of magnitude more efficient than either.
Old poorly sourced image to make my point: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0960148112003254-gr1.jpg
Um, surely even getting fit doesn't stop you from using energy in order to walk? I would buy something like "getting fit means you're a more efficient walker and need less energy (because less of it is wasted)" but would be surprised if it was by more than a factor of 2. If anything, at the upper end of fitness is where I would expect you to actually need to eat more in order to walk more (whereas at the lower end of the spectrum, you have the energy to spare).
I guess it depends how you account for calories, since we use our bodies for a lot more than transportation. I know that I can happily walk 14 miles without changing my food consumption. Maybe my body is just really inefficient the rest of the time (fidgeting, being unnecessarily warm etc).
That makes sense. I don't regularly walk for 14 miles in a day, so I do end up eating more on the rare days that I do, but that also has all sorts of confounders.
There are two objections I can see. First, doing more exercise may not require eating all the extra calories involved. I will ignore that; after all, if you're considering personal tradeoffs, you might actually be in the population where walking an extra 14 miles totally does require eating an extra 1400 calories. But, second, beef (aka cheeseburgers) are known to be a particularly bad source of calories in terms of carbon footprint; see for example https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local.
Assuming you get most of the additional calories from plant-based foods (which seems plausible even if you're not a vegetarian), I'm getting that walking 20 miles requires 2000 calories = 700g of bread = 700g of wheat = 2lbs CO2 (compared to the 16lbs for driving or 1lb for taking a bus). So in this model, walking is less efficient than taking a bus (per mile), but much more efficient than driving. Assuming cycling is 2x as efficient as walking, it's about equivalent to taking a bus (per mile). I agree this would've been interesting to include in the spreadsheet.
Yes, I would love to see a spreadsheet entry for "eating a typical 800-calorie meal" that was more realistic than just a cheeseburger. Maybe a beef fast-food combo and chicken fast-food combo for non-vegetarian meals, a vegetarian pizza for vegetarian meals, and spaghetti with tomato sauce and vegetables for vegan meals?
Something like that, anyway.
I would be surprised if human-produced energy was more environmentally friendly than most alternatives. Humans require very expensive fuel that needs to be preserved over long distances and taste good. Unless you're on one of those diets that gets a lot of calories from dosing olive oil. My intuition says that vegetable fat must be fairly easy to produce, per calorie.
You would actually be surprised how effective humans are at moving, especially when using something like a bicycle plus the exercise is not just extra calorie expenditure. It makes you happier and healthier requiring less medical attention later down the road.
The issue with cars is that you are moving a 2 ton cage around you and producing soot as well as NOx and other compounds.
I object to using the word "carbon" as a short hand for carbon dioxide (CO2).
Elemental carbon is most familiar to us as amorphous black powder. As such it is literally dirty, and if areosolized and inhaled can represent a serious threat to health. It may also be found in crystalline form as diamonds, which no one regards as an environmental problem.
Carbon Dioxide on the other hand, is a colorless, odorless, non-toxic gas that is the basis of all food chains in Earth's biosphere. (yes quibblers, I know about the extremophiles).
It is pretty much unchallenged that the Atmospheric concentration of CO2, which was 280 ppm in the early 20th Century is now about 420 ppm, halfway from 280 to a doubling of 560.
Some "scientists" and some politicians claim that the increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has caused the average global temperature to increase about 1°C from 14.5 to 15.5.
This temperature increase is deputed to be responsible for all kinds of phenomenon -- wild fires, droughts, hurricanes, floods, and rising ocean levels.
Some of them say that we can mitigate or alleviate these problems by removing fossil fuels from our use of energy.
Fossil fuels are cheap, plentiful, and very useful. To get the public on board this effort, some politicians and theier media acolytes are willing to engage in propagandistic techniques.
Using Carbon (black, greasy powder) as a synonym for CO2 (life giving odorless, colorless gas, is deceptive and designed to persuade voters by using fear as an emotion.
I would like to see this practice dropped. If you mean CO2 say CO2. Don't try to conuse already difficult issues.
> Some "scientists" and some politicians claim that the increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has caused the average global temperature to increase about 1°C from 14.5 to 15.5.
Scare quotes here are ridiculous. Are you claiming that C02 concentration is not causing increase in greenhouse effect? That is one of the most transparent science denial.
only his scientific claims about CO2 being good seem to count as real science. With that mindset everything is provable
I didn't say that CO2 does not contribute to the so-called greenhouse effect. It is the amount of contribution that is at issue. IPCC AR6 says that the ECS for CO2 doubling is 2.5-4 K. Judy Curry and Nick Lewis say is is about 1.6 K.
I take the use of word denial as a personal insult. I am a Jew. Close relatives of mine were murdered by the Nazis. Using the word denial in a scientific discussion is an ad hominem of the lowest sort.
"This meta-analysis is wrong because I found this other paper that confirms my priors!"
I am not saying either is wrong. I am saying that it is a matter of scientific dispute.
And I am saying what you are doing is presenting false balance, because one is a meta-analysis and the other is a random paper.
That's not how science works. We don't measure the mass in kilograms of the papers for and against a point of view and declare the larger stack the winner. So yours is a sociological, emotional, or political argument -- but not a scientific argument.
> This temperature increase is deputed to be responsible for all kinds of phenomenon (...) rising ocean levels.
Are you claiming that this is not well proved? I have not investigated other but denying this one is absurd.
If you think the relationship between atmospheric temperature and sea levels is proved please provide us with a citation.
That is really basic info, matching also basic physical processes.
See https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/ for some intro-level materials
> Sea level rise is caused primarily by two factors related to global warming: the added water from melting ice sheets and glaciers and the expansion of seawater as it warms.
that is a hypothesis, not a proof. the numbers NASA gives are disputed as well.
So are you claiming that sea rise is also faked?
Sea rise is not faked. It is measured. NASA has given some numbers derived from satellite orbits. They have been criticized as being insufficiently accurate to provide meaningful data. I do not recall the details but the claimed amount of increase is in millimeters per year and the orbits are not accurately determined within millimeters. Other data comes from tide gauges, that have their own problems like local subsidence.
Please be careful with your use of the word deny.
Are you claiming that
(1) ocean levels are not rising
or
(2) rising ocean levels are not caused by climate change
? If yes, then you are denying well confirmed scientific knowledge.
If no, why you used "is deputed to be responsible" that - as far as I understand English - suggests that this relationship as not actually confirmed.
I am saying that the word deny is being used to silence skeptics by classifying them with Holocaust deniers. It is a base slander. I will not put up with it. It causes me to doubt your good faith.
1) it was definitely not intended to be used in that way
2) is there other word expressing this that would be more fitting?
Disagree with statements. Do not impute motives to people you have never meet and do not know.
I think the relevant (2) should be *anthropogenic* climate change, that caused by humans. Ocean levels have been rising since the end of the last Ice Age, and the climate has been gradualling getting warmer, because it does that thing. The Earth's climate is never just stable for tens of millions of years, it changes all the time -- CO2 goes up, goes down, the temperature rises, falls, ice sheets advance, retreat, ecosystems move steadily around.
The *important* questions are: (1) Is it happening much faster than ever before? Which requires you to measure not just sea level rise, but any *acceleration* in sea level rise. And (2) is it happening because of human activity, or would the same thing be happening anyway? Which is a *really* hard question to answer, because it involves accurately predicting a counterfactual: what *would* have been the sea-level rise if the internal combustion engine had not been invented, but all other natural processes had continued to operate? You need to build a model of the Earth's surface which includes every important natural and artificial process, and then carefully delete only the artificial ones. A very tall order, as anyone modeling a complex system can tell you. It's entirely reasonable that people would be inherently skeptical that you did it right.
as I cast a baleful glance at the coffee cup full of #2 pencils on my desktop...
Carbon dioxide (note the lack of non-sentence-initial capitals) is not odorless. It dissolves in your mucous membranes to form carbonic acid, which has an acidic smell.
Your claims that carbon dioxide does not cause a temperature increase are ridiculous. Are you saying that carbon dioxide molecules do not have a vibrational mode in the infrared? Are you claiming that they will somehow always re-emit the infrared photon that's excited them away from Earth's surface?
You are refuting a claim I did not make. The relevant question is how much. please refer to my response to @Traveling_through_time above.
"However, at normally encountered concentrations it is odorless." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide
At normally encountered concentrations, botulinum toxin does not kill either.
At low concentrations botulinum toxin is a medicine. My daughter receives injections of it to prevent debilitating migraines. Poison is made by the dose. Even water can be fatal.
The point is that "normally encountered concentrations" is misleading because the normally encountered concentrations are negligible. The normally encountered concentration of botulinum is 0. The normally encountered concentration of carbon dioxide is around 0.04. If you want to be pedantic, check your facts.
Zero is not an encountered concentration. I abjure further quibbling.
That isn't really relevant. The optical depth of CO2 is sufficiently short that changing the CO2 concentration in the troposphere wouldn't do squat to change the amount of IR absorbed. All that can be absorbed already is by the natural concentrations. It's like adding more salt to a saturated saline solution.
That doesn't mean extra CO2 can't change the surface temperature of the Earth, but the mechanism is *way* more complex than "well CO2 absorbs in the IR, and so that retains energy and the Earth's surface heats up..." The whole "greenhouse" analogy is deeply flawed.
Here's a really nice introduction to the full theory, which I think is accessible to anyone who groks the basic physics:
http://clivebest.com/blog/?p=1169
Thanks for the link. That makes sense.
> Using Carbon (black, greasy powder) as a synonym for CO2 (life giving odorless, colorless gas, is deceptive and designed to persuade voters by using fear as an emotion.
That's a very far reaching claim. Equivalent to saying, for example, that using "gas" as shorthand for automobile fuel called gasoline in the US is deceptive and designed to give consumers a feeling of "lightness" and "naturalness" associated with refueling the car, rather than the actual smelly, greasy liquid involved.
Can you make a case why one is a purposefully designed deception and the other just a convenient shorthand?
> Using Carbon (black
The most common use (70%) of carbon black is as a pigment and reinforcing phase in automobile tires. Carbon black also helps conduct heat away from the tread and belt area of the tire, reducing thermal damage and increasing tire life. About 20% of world production goes into belts, hoses, and other non-tire rubber goods. The balance is mainly used as a pigment in inks, coatings and plastics.
From Wikipedia.
I'm skeptical of the "replace SUV with regular car" and "replace car with Tesla" numbers. You are going to sell your current vehicle, and someone else will drive it and emit the carbon. If you are buying a new vehicle, getting a Tesla is better than getting an SUV, but once a car is on the road it doesn't matter how often it is sold on the used market.
It depends on how you model car ownership. If before you sell, there are N cars on the road, then once you sell and buy a Tesla, there are N+1 cars. If you assume the number of drivers stays the same, then you sell your car to someone, who sells their car, etc. Somewhere the chain will terminate and some car will drop off the road. At this point, it's probably a fair assumption that it will be on average a gas powered car.
How much discount you apply for each step is a matter of debate, but I don't think it ends up having zero benefit. That said, I've often heard it said that it's better to only go electric when you're going to replace your car anyway instead of doing it early solely for the sake of going electric.
Added benefit: the person who is junking their car at the end of the chain likely has the oldest car in the chain with some pretty bad mileage/emissions.
I think your assumption about the number of drivers staying the same is incorrect, not everyone who wants a car has one. There is always a market for cheap cars that run, the only time a car drops off the road is if it is broken beyond economic repair. There are a lot of poor people who live in cities with bad public transportation and will buy any car they can afford, since it means they can go places without planning around bus schedules or getting rides from friends and family.
Right, my argument depends on at least some new cars causing old ones to drop off the road. Of course, even if it is true that any working cars will immediately get snatched up, there's the question of whether trying to lower carbon emissions by preventing poor people from buying cars is really the right move. (I'm not trying to move the goal posts here, I'm aware this is a separate issue.)
But there's also a market for cars that will rarely run. A city-dweller who usually commutes by public transit or Uber will sometimes buy a car that will be used for errands and out-of-town trips every week or two, or a household will buy a car that isn't used for daily driving but only on the occasion where every driver in the household is going in a different direction, etc.
And half the time, "replace SUV w/regular car" or "replace regular car w/Tesla" is going to mean not actually selling the old gas-guzzler, but keeping it in the garage for when it turns out to be the right tool for the job and until it is junk.
Halve of carbon emmissions are in car production anyways. If you are going to do "replacement" do it when you were going to buy a new car anyways.
The most efficient cars should be given to the people driving the further distance.
Within a household, this can be done easily, but has anyone tried to figure out how to do it at a larger group? Buying a Tesla for my neighbor who drives 150 miles (each way) to work would be best, but WTF am I buying a luxury car for my neighbor?
Maybe someone has tried to answer this, though. Sounds damn interesting.
Isn't any difference ("difference") a U.S. or European citizen can make by minor lifestyle changes essentially a rounding error — if that! — compared to the actual causes of greenhouse gas emissions (e.g., Chinese industry, Indian agriculture, etc)? Even if everyone in the U.S. together decided to make a few of these little changes?
You can effect Chinese industry by buying less stuff, especially stuff that is not really useful or replaceable.
India produces a lot less CO2 than the USA, despite being way more populous. You can also make anything seem insignificant by comparing your individual actions to the collective actions of a billion people. However with that mindset you might as well fall into nihilism.
Thanks Scott. Much appreciated.
I would like to read an argument for the point of view that that reducing carbon emissions (or increasing carbon capture) is a) a good way to combat climate change or b) a good thing to do in general.
A number of people seem to take this as obvious (like here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/climate/climate-change-report-ipcc-un.html), but I don't see why.
>I would like to read an argument for the point of view that that reducing carbon emissions (or increasing carbon capture) is a) a good way to combat climate change
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change
https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/stories/nasa-knows/what-is-climate-change-k4.html
https://climate.nasa.gov/
Why make this kind of annoying and useless reply?
To be clear, I'm aware that reducing carbon emissions is one possible response to climate change. I've read that there are other options, for example, releasing reflective material into the atmosphere. I'm not a specialist and have no idea which approach is best. I'm curious if any SSC readers are better informed on the topic.
> I'm aware that reducing carbon emissions is one possible response to climate change
I was not aware and your question was not indicating that you are interested in comparing C02 control with more speculative ideas. Sorry if that answer was not useful.
Okay, sorry for being unclear.
Are you wondering why a global reduction in carbon emissions would combat climate change? Or are you asking something more indirect, like how do we know that even if one country reduces emissions, another won't feel free to increase them because of the increased climate headroom?
I'm wondering why the sources I've read (like the linked article), seem to assume that we should react to climate change by cutting carbon emissions, instead of by doing something else, like the options listed in this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering, or perhaps by doing nothing at all.
If that viewpoint is based on data of some kind, I think people should be aware of those data. If there are no data supporting it, that would be important to know as well.
I mean the reason to not do nothing is basically that in the long run it costs more to do nothing than to reduce the warming. The reason why people tend to prioritise emissions reductions first instead of geoengineering is probably because we know emissions reductions will work and there is a lot of research about them, while geoengineering is notoriously under-researched and each technique comes with its own pros and cons.
Have you read the ICCC reports? They're pretty comprehensive
5% of global GDP yearly seems about right. It basically means that we can solve an existential problem by giving up on two years of growth. It's far from negligible, but it's also very doable - CO2 emissions are almost entirely a *diplomatic* issue where most countries try to dodge doing their part.
Very pleased with how the EU is doing the easy, reasonable, sensible thing - carbon costs plus carbon tolls. This is essentially all that's needed (although the carbon is costed too low still) - the market will sort the rest out.
The two most important lacks I see in this chart are:
(1) It doesn't account for the variation in where your power comes from, which is very important. There is only one source of *new* CO2 into the atmosphere, and that is the combustion of fossil fuels.
For example, let's say you live in Quebec and 90% of your electricity comes from hydro. If you and someone from Indiana, say, whose electricity comes entirely from a coal plant, indulge in the same activity that requires the consumption of X kWh of electricity, then the amount of "carbon" you've contributed is 1/10 that the Indianan contributed.
For the same reason, Frenchmen have a lower "carbon" footprint than Englishmen for the exact same activities, and Californians have a lower footprint than Midwesterners.
(2) It doesn't account for the "carbon" costs of making changes. For example, building a Tesla involves significantly more CO2 emission than building a Honda Accord. People tend to think it works out over the lifetime of the car, if the Tesla uses electricity from some reasonably modest CO2 emitting source, the car is kept a long time, nobody adjusts his behavior in response, but my impression is that it's a close call at best, and it's possible in some cases the net CO2 emission of the change is unfortunately positive.
For that matter, if you consider switching *everybody* in the US to electric cars, and expanding the electricity generation and transmission infrastructure by 40% -- wow, that capital cost in "carbon" is staggering, and the payback period (meaning when you reach net negative "carbon") would probably be decades.
I wouldn't expect you to add some more dimensions to your chart, because of the lack of 3D holographic monitors among your readership, but I feel these are valuable footnotes to add, just so that people consider these "background" issues, too, which can in cases dwarf any "foreground" choice.
"There is only one source of *new* CO2 into the atmosphere, and that is the combustion of fossil fuels."
This is outright false, for any number of reasons.
Such as?
CO2 emissions from cement (about 8% of global CO2 emissions, so not negligible).
CO2 emissions from the ground, for instance after clearing forests.
And since we're talking CO2-equivalents here, various ways methane can be released, as again from the ground.
Aren't cement CO2 emissions indirectly caused by usage of fossil fuels to make said cement?
No. Cement is made by converting calcium carbonate (chalk, limestone) to calcium oxide (lime) by heating it, driving off the carbon dioxide. If the power to heat the process comes from fossil fuels, so much the worse.
Yes. Wikipedia: "The initial calcination reaction in the production of cement is responsible for about 4% of global CO2 emissions."
(1) Sure, you need a shit-ton of thermal energy to make cement, and you get that by burning fossil fuels. (There are people who will point out you make cement by reducing CaCO3 to CaO, thus -- aha! -- emitting CO2, but that's silly because what do you think happens when the concrete sets? The CaO turns back into CaCO3, of course, re-absorbing the exact same amount of CO2 that was emitted when it was built.) So this changes nothing.
(2) Where did the carbon in the forests or carbon floor come from? From atmospheric CO2, of course. It's certainly true you're releasing CO2 that was stashed there 100-1000 years ago, but that's not what I'd call "new". Furthermore, it can readily be restored to the same place merely by allowing forest areas to expand (which they have actually done in the United States for the last century or so). It's an easy fix. It's in a whole other category than burning fossil fuels, which emits CO2 that hasn't seen the light of day (so to speak) in 300 million years, and which *cannot* be returned to its source in any easy way.
(3) Methane is generically unstable under oxidizing conditions, so it has to be produced (usually by biological processes) on a short time scale (this is why it's considered a "signature of life" in exobiology), and the only way it's produced is by reduction of atmospheric CO2 by various life forms. Once again, it's not new. There is a major exception to this, which is methane released from natural gas extraction -- but of course, that's in the fossil fuel category.
Volcanoes - about 1% of CO2 emissions.
Decomposition of organic matter - triggered by clearing forests
Methane clathrates may be potentially problematic, unfreezing permafrost...
Production of more powerful C02 equivalents (methane production, for example by cows, is one more well known case)
(1) Volcanoes are part of the natural cycle. I didn't say boo about the enormous number and types of natural carbon sinks and sources, but probably should have specified that for clarity.
(2) As I said above, that's not "new" carbon, it came from atmospheric CO2 on a time scale of centuries, roughly. The distinction is important, because it's quite easy to put "back" into that reservoir -- you just let the forest regrow, as it has been doing in North America for the past 100 years or so -- whereas it is very difficult to do the same with "ancient" carbon extracted from fossil fuel reservoirs.
(3) Well, OK, but that hasn't happened yet, it's still entirely hypothetical, and it's not clear we should consider clathrates in a wholly different category as fossil fuels. They're both fossilized carbon, so to speak.
(4) Methane comes from two places: from fossil fuel (nat gas) reservoirs, and from biological processes, which take atmospheric CO2 and reduce it. Methane from the biological sources is just part of the short-term carbon cycle. Methane from fossil fuel reservoirs is ancient carbon, but it is, of course, a fossil fuel.
> Volcanoes
And anyway minuscule compared to human activity (AFAIK about 1% of what people emit, large eruptions can reduce overall emissions by grounding planes).
> on a time scale of centuries, roughly
AFAIK permafrost can be far older (but nor rally sure)
> Well, OK, but that hasn't happened yet, it's still entirely hypothetical, and it's not clear we should consider clathrates in a wholly different category as fossil fuels
I was nitpicking "burning" part, they can get released even without power used by humans
> Methane from the biological sources is just part of the short-term carbon cycle.
Yes, but methane is far more powerful in greenhouse effect that CO2 - so even if it is not new coal it is getting much worse
> indulge in the same activity that requires the consumption of X kWh of electricity, then the amount of "carbon" you've contributed is 1/10 that the Indianan contributed
not true if C02 was emitted somewhere else or during part not mitigated by clear electricity
Note for example buying plastic objects where
(1) electricity is not important
(2) were likely made in China anyway
Really not following that. The definition of the "activity" was that it consumed X kWh of electricity that came from burning fossil fuels. So if you're saying X is not actually X, but some other number...uh...I guess so, the person evaluating X could be mistaken, but I'm m not sure what the general point is.
Buying plastic objects I rather suspect is carbon-positive (good) in general, because they take way less power inputs to manufacture and transport than equivalent wood, paper, or steel objects, and they last longer than paper and wood. That's also what makes them more economical, of course.
Comparing the space tourism numbers with the Falcon 9 numbers, I am pretty sure the space tourism numbers are for an orbital flight, not suborbital.
It is fairly difficult to come up with the equivalent marginal CO2 cost of a suborbital flight at this stage in development. Most of the calculation is driven by subjective calls: how do we amortize prototyping across a limited service life? How do we count non-carbon atmospheric pollutants, and with what adjustment for atmospheric layer? For non-carbon fuels, do we account for the energy cost of their production (and at what carbon rate)?
My best efforts tend to give results in the 30-300 tons/person range (probably closer to the low end), and don't make for very clean citation. Splitting the Falcon 9 launch number five ways gives 74 tons/person, so it's a surprisingly decent ballpark figure.
Hey Scott, I see no other way to contact you in general so I guess I should use a comment. Under what license can your posts (or their content) be used by third parties? Old blog as said here (https://slatestarcodex.com/about/) was under CC BY 4.0 - is that still the case? Is there a difference in paid/free posts? What about images like the blog icon or your avatar? I don't have any particular use in mind right now, so if license depends on the use, that'd be good to know too. Thanks in advance.
Sometimes I wonder how better city planning that would incentivize more bycicle use could have an impact on climate and health. Especially American cities seem poorly planned. This YouTuber really opened my eyes to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM
Definitely! The question is how large. In my city I never use car, I use solely bicycle for all transport inside city.
I wish there was microcovid.org but for carbon.
There seems to be an obvious discrepancy between "Fly on a 747 LA → NYC" and "Send a 747 LA → NYC". The emission ratio implies 180 passengers, while the cost ratio implies 1079 passengers, resulting in a 6-fold difference in "% cost". There could be some difference based on how the costs are calculated, or perhaps if the airliner hauls some cargo for money in addition to the passengers and their luggage, but not this much.
Amazon forest is the only one left ? I know Californians are burning what they have left, for example, but I always consider waaay too political to just pinpoint Amazon as the only one that matters for the world.
> It’s because I’m less responsible [...] they’re probably mostly order-of-magnitude correct, and I believe having probably mostly order-of-magnitude correct estimates is better than having no estimates at all.
We should just popularize measuring CO2 emissions in dB.
Because I am in incurable smartarse, while I appreciated the differentiation between "Amazon (the rainforest)" and "Amazon (the company)", I at once thought "but what about 'Amazon (the queen Hippolyta)'?"
I am rather sceptical towards the idea of offsetting fossil fuels by planting trees.
From my understanding, fossil fuels are very much part of the deep carbon cycle, having been removed from the biosphere for millions of years. Taking that out of the earth, burning it and then paying for someone to plant or keep a tree for (optimistically) some hundred years does not really seem sufficient here.
Of course, on a short time scale, trees might help. If the main goal is to keep the permafrost carbon in place for the next century, or just keep the sea water from rising to much until until fusion power, the second coming, or the singularity etc arrives and a long term solution is reached, trees might be worthwhile. Still, it is a band-aid at best.
What I do not know (and was unable to find quickly) is how long an additional ton of CO2 from fossil fuels will remain in the biosphere carbon cycle until the carbon ends up on the sea floor and enters the deep cycle again. There probably should be an effective half-life (more CO2 -> more plankton -> more seabed carbon)? Of course, this also assumes that the system is still in equilibrium and not in runaway mode (permafrost CO2 being released etc), so this point is probably moot.
The Climeworks approach of turning CO2 into carbonate rock seems better. While I am generally sceptical of geo-sequestration (e.g. just pumping the CO2 into underground structures and hope it happens to stay there forever) to the point of assuming it to be green-washing, carbonates such as CaCO3 are what even I would call a long-term storage, given that limestone mountains are a thing.
Naturally, as long as there are still people around irresponsible enough to burn fossil fuels for primary energy, it would probably be easier to capture the exhaust of the power plants directly instead of getting it out of the air. Still, I can see why one would not want to have a business model depending on irresponsible people.
The natural process of carbonate rock weathering runs faster as the amount of carbon in the air increases. IIRC, it can halve the current atmospheric carbon excess in about a thousand years. So if we can stick carbon somewhere it will take more than a few thousand years to escape, we’ve solved the problem by putting it off. This is why deep-ocean carbon dioxide storage counts as a solution to the problem: overturning circulation will take one or two thousand years to bring that co2 laden water back to the surface.
I'm always terrified we'll pump a bunch of carbon somewhere, think it's okay, and then one day it will all belch out at once, not only willing anyone nearby (not too relevant for the middle of the ocean, admittedly) as well as just putting it right back into the sky.
https://www.wired.com/2008/08/dayintech-0821/
Bus carbon lbs. depends heavily (order of magnitude difference) on the number of passengers on the bus. Any idea what average number your source uses?
On Google's carbon usage, does it count for anything that they purchase offsets with corporate earnings and claim to be carbon neutral since 2007? https://sustainability.google/commitments/#leading-at-google
Although this is an interesting academic exercise the bulk of future emission increases that would make warming a threat are from developing nations raising their standard of living and increasing their populations.
I think these type of efforts are mostly vanity exercises (not accusing this specific author of this) that willfully ignore fundamental problems. If you want to reduce global emissions then you need to make it cheap and easy for people who barely have indoor plumbing to improve their standard of living with low carbon energy.
Professionals contemplating reducing their hours of AC in SF (this is laughable from a Florida perspective) isn't a good guideline to how poor people in Africa are going to behave when their standard of living allows them to have AC. If building a local coal plant makes this half the cost of unsubsidized solar energy then they will make a very predictable decision. See Roger Pielke Jr's decade old iron law of climate policy.
The best thing we can do is use our technical ability to make the cost of low carbon energy cheaper than fossil fuels. Almost everything should be focused on this objective given how increased global emissions will evolve over time and how real world economic decisions are routinely made. Eating less cheeseburgers is a useless distraction.
Much progress has been made on making low carbon energy cheaper. The developing world needs to see choosing this power option as an obvious choice without a condescending first world climate guilt lecture. That's how we make progress.
". If you want to reduce global emissions then you need to make it cheap and easy for people who barely have indoor plumbing to improve their standard of living with low carbon energy."
We have renewable energy sources that are cheaper than fossil fuels , so problem solved....?
I'm not against renewable energy, but somehow there are lots of coal plants still being built today. The people who are making those decisions are clearly not convinced for all the usual reasons. Intermittency, start up costs, etc. Economics underlies these decisions and this still needs work.
Some quick comments:
- Cool post, agree that it's better to have somewhat inaccurate estimates than to have none. Thank you for promoting climate action!
- Emissions from anything related to electricity depend a lot on the source of that electricity, so I'm not sure how useful the averages are. If you can, it's better to use zero-carbon electricity instead of reducing electricity consumption.
- Emissions from having children are indeed very philosophically complicated. Your approach kind of makes sense, but if you heavily discount future emissions like this, it would make sense to apply the same kind of discounting in other estimates. AFAIK, most people who calculate emissions estimates for various activities don't do this so there's a bit of inconsistency. I don't really have a proposal on how to do this better. I also think that children of climate-conscious people can very well have a positive impact on climate in the future, so go figure.
- Offsets are almost as complicated as emissions from children. My wife, who advises governments on carbon markets, says that for the most part they don't work (because the reductions are not counted against a realistic baseline, there's double-counting, there's no permanence of emission reductions and a host of other problems). Climateworks and similar projects are reasonable though. The best way that we have identified so far is buying credits in a trustworthy emissions trading system like EU ETS and holding them (cancelling them will not work in the case of EU ETS because of a thing called Market Stability Reserve that will release more credits into the market if the supply is too low). There's a company that allows individual to do this: https://www.compensators.org/ -- for as long as the EU doesn't revise how the EU ETS works, this might be a good way. Even better way it to not create the emissions in the first place.
- Planting / saving trees I would see as one of the least reliable forms of offsetting, since with trees you're sending carbon into the future instead of removing it from the cycle. How far into the future is anyone's guess. There are some projects that take permanence somewhat seriously, so you need pay attention to this, if you are into offsetting via planting trees.
- My friends who did research on individual action against climate change say that the most impactful way is political action (which is high on your list). Unfortunately climate-conscious politicians often bring other problems with them (e.g. in Germany the Green Party is anti-nuclear and has some socialist policies that I don't support). I guess it's the same problem as with any other voting: hard to find parties that do no harm in addition to the good that you want them to do.
For Climeworks, do we know how much CO2 it takes to build & run their factories?
To run, optimally zero as they utilise zero carbon electricity (they are currently basing the machines in Iceland for this reason)
Build - they allege a 10% grey emission rate, which I think is factored into their offsets. (so you actually buy 100 tonnes of capture per 90 tonnes paid for.)
However, I don't see a published LifeCycle Assessment, so you would have to take it on trust. Presumably, some of the major investors have seen an LCA.
https://climeworks.com/co2-removal
Found it!
https://climeworks.com/news/life-cycle-assessment-direct-air-capture
To get "useful" levels of carbon capture, how much would it require our grid to grow?
So, say, assume we made our current grid perfectly zero carbon: how much *more* energy would we want, compared to the size of the grid, to get the *other* major things we want to electrify.
For example, handwavey, to electrify all driving in the US:
* 3000 billion miles driven a year https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10315
* good EV gets about 4 miles to the KWh
* so need 750 billion KWh per year
* grid makes about 4000 billion KWh per year https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us-generation-capacity-and-sales.php
* So need grid about 20% bigger than now
How much bigger does the grid need to be to capture "America's share" (or whatever, defining the problem is part of the problem) of carbon?
I'm not sure if there is a good tool for the USA, but this gives some overview of the challenges for the UK to decarbonise, electrify and offset
https://mackaycarboncalculator.beis.gov.uk/overview/
To be honest, some of the 'ambitious' seem low-balled, but that might just be my own biases.
Anyways, they think its reasonable that it might take 1 TWh to remove 1 million tCO2 in 2050. Climeworks say that they need "2'000 kWh heat and approx. 650 kWh electricity per ton of carbon dioxide that is captured", which is 2.65 the Mackay Calcs rate.
Assuming USA electricity is decarbonised per your scenario, the remainder of the USA from the table would be 6200 billion lbs CO2, requiring ~3 billion tCO2 offset. Using Climeworks, this would be 8,000 billion kWh (or 8 trillion kWh). Based on data from the US EIA, which put 2019 grid generation at 4 trillion kWh, that would put final US electricity needs at 4.8+8 = 12.8 trillion kWh.
Health warning: with US sources using lbs and short tons and other archaic measurements, I may be a bit off.
Thanks. Just to hand-wave, I'm going to pretend the US needs to spend 50 years taking out the same CO2 it spent 50 years putting in, so taking out about 5000 million tons per year for 50 years. That'll be 5000TWh, or over 100x our current grid.
We're gonna need massive amounts of nuclear power if my is right, even within an order of magnitude, and even if we give ourselves 3x as long to take it out as we put it in.
1.25 current grid to get the 5000 TWh (a billion kwh in a TWh, so current grid is 4000 TWh) for the 50 year drawdown, which makes much more intuitive sense.
To be honest, that would be a noble (and achievable, if expensive!) goal.
On nuclear, I have my own views that come from working on the peripheries of the industry, but if anyone can crack that nut then it can be beneficial to the mix.
Thanks, I was pretty sure I was making some big mistake, but couldn't figure out where.
I'm sort of surprised that running a dryer is less than one cheeseburger! Since cheese is about half the emissions of beef, and I'm a vegetarian, I wonder if that means that a dryer cycle is comparable to a grilled cheese.
I'm also surprised that adjusting the thermostat by a couple degrees is already a tenth as valuable as being vegetarian!
I cook my cheeseburger in the dryer cycle so I can have it for free (from a carbon view).
So the global yearly carbon deficit is 0.6-40% of GDP with a geometric mean of 5% of GDP.
It was a cool Wednesday morning when I first met Jordan, a middle-aged young man from Twin Falls, Idaho. He had just finished making his shitty keurig coffee before sitting down at the dilapidated PC he built for gaming 8 years ago. As he does every morning, he began working through his morning list of news and blog posts. He noticed a new post on Astral Codex Ten and was eager to begin reading. "What could this one be about?" he asked out loud. But suddenly, his faced filled with dread and he prayed out loud: "God I really hope he doesn't fucking open with some story filled with minute and distracting details. Why does every goddamn article and blog post need to start with a long story before saying the thing they wanted to say!? In my work, this form of self-flagellation is just part of the daily grind" he told me. He began to say something else, but halted and quickly abandoned the thought. After a sigh, he followed the link to Scott's new post.
"Oh, look!" Jordan exclaimed. "Scott just starts the article by saying the thing he wanted to say. I fucking love Scott" he said while wearing the stupidest grin one could imagine. Jordan later told me that his days don't normally begin like this and that [insert transition]...
Kudos. (Was that brief enough?)
Haha its not being verbose that's maddening. Its that the first 1 or 2 paragraphs of almost every news article is (apparently) some kind of vacuous "hook" for the reader... who was already hooked by the headline...
Am I the only one thinking that carbon offsets are basically useless? There's the issue Scott mentions, but I think the bigger picture is the cost of buying them means the temptation to free-ride here is enormous, so almost nobody does it. What percentage of people who consider themselves environmentalists and who are concerned about climate change have ever in their lives purchased any dollar amount of carbon offsets, much less do so regularly? I'll bet it's under 5%.
Well, it seems that they are useful to people who think like Scott, i.e. who increase their peace of mind by taking direct personal action to counteract the perceived harm their behaviour caused, without having to endure renouncing said behavior completely. This does seem to be a pretty specific demographic, under 5% of concerned environmentalists sounds reasonable.
1) some things funded are positive in general (forests for example)
2) It is also funding development of technologies that may become useful to be deployed on far larger scale
There are major omissions and fundamental problems with this analysis, and its conclusions are accordingly misguided and empty.
In sum first, substantiated below:
1/ Household consumption is brushed off as insignificant when it is actually 60% of global greenhouse gas generation, and only direct generation is considered.
2/ Wealthy households contribute disproportionately to GHG emissions, compounding our responsibility w/r/t #1.
3/ This fails to acknowledge or address consumer culture and the profligate waste it engenders.
4/ The import of the figures in the tables for individual activities & actions are grossly minimized by a/ using individual instead of population magnitudes and b/ by using discrete single usage figures instead of annual amounts.
5/ This analysis implicitly wishes for a silver bullet and denies the potential for many smaller changes to make a significant difference in aggregate.
6/ The discussion only posits absurdly hyperbolic options as the alternatives to inaction and resignation.
7/ There is, contra the framing here, abundant cause to conclude that it is more than worthwhile for individuals to invest some of their time and energy toward more conscious consumption and sustainability.
In detail:
1/ Household consumption is estimated to contribute over 60% of global greenhouse gas emissions. (1) Only ~20% is directly generated; the other 40% are generated indirectly by upstream production and trade networks. (2) The “personal activity” section ignores this entirely, considering only direct generation. This omission alone invalidates the conclusions.
2/ Compounding the above, wealthy households contribute disproportionately to GHG emissions. The US is proportional worse than the globe, and wealthier Americans are worse than their compatriots. US households with $150k annual income produce over 2x the average American household, and 4-5x low income households. (2)
Given household consumption generates 60+% of emissions globally, we can therefore conclude that American household emissions represent a disproportionate fraction of that amount. It is therefore worthwhile–necessary even–for Americans to make efforts to mitigate our household impact.
3/ Any examination of individual behaviors and their contribution to climate change that fails to address consumer culture and the profligate waste it engenders is not a serious one. Clothing is a salient example: the fashion industry is estimated (3) to generate 10% of annual global carbon emissions and 20% of global wastewater. And textiles are the largest segment of the US post-consumer waste stream. Producing a *single pair* of Levi’s 501 jeans generates 30 lbs of carbon emissions. (4)
Should we really believe that there’s no room for individual choice to affect this? Could we halve the amount of clothing we consume by choosing quality over quantity and questioning our compulsion for novelty? Should one repair a ripped pant seam instead of just buying a new pair from Old Navy for $20? Or is that “obsessing too much”?
4/ The import of the figures in the tables for individual activities & actions are grossly minimized by a/ using individual instead of population magnitudes and b/ by using discrete single usage figures instead of annual amounts.
Take driving: The table only cites a single car trip of 20 miles, but the average American drives 13,500 mi/Y (5), and there are 328M Americans. 16 lbs for a short trip certainly looks trivial, but hundreds of millions of people, each taking hundreds of such trips is huge. Indeed, cars & light trucks generated 17% of total US GHG emissions in 2018 (8,9). Using your figure of 16 lbs/20 mi driven and estimating 2/3 the population of 328M are drivers, that’s 2,400 Billion lbs of CO2/Y. There are myriad ways for an individual to reduce their personal contribution to this from alternative modes to fewer trips to modified driving style to… the list goes on.
Or air conditioning: There are about 100 million homes in the US with air conditioning. If your 2° AC savings is correct, that’s as much as 24 Billion fewer lbs CO2 emitted / year.
The decision to hide the scale effects obscures the reality that individual behaviors *in aggregate* are often major contributors, and therefore individuals do have cause (a responsibility, even) to inspect and perhaps amend their own practices.
5/ This analysis implicitly denies the potential for many smaller changes to make a significant difference in aggregate. We should not expect or seek a silver bullet solution to climate change.
6/ “all you have to do is spend 11,000 hours without air conditioning, and you'll have saved the same amount of carbon an F-35 burns on one airstrike”
Here one begins to wonder if this is all just trolling. This is an obviously false dichotomy and, as shown above, totally ignores the relative scale. 100 million homes, 2° AC adjustment -> 24 Billion fewer lbs CO2 emitted. If the US flies 10,000 F-35 sorties per yer, that’s 0.57 Billion lbs CO2.
7/ There is, contra the framing here, abundant cause to conclude that it is more than worthwhile for individuals to invest some of their time and energy toward more conscious consumption and sustainability.
The suggested actions are nothing more than a modern version of the assurance that if you just read your scripture (stay informed), say your prayers (vote), tithe on Sundays (donate to charities), and occasionally buy an indulgence (offsets), you can sleep soundly at night with the knowledge you’ll be granted passage at the pearly gates.
“You don’t need to obsess too much…or give up too many of the things you enjoy”
This is tautological and completely fails to engage the issue honestly. The question is not whether one needs to OBSESS or go full ascetic, rather it is whether one should be investing some nontrivial amount of time and effort to be more conscious about consumption and live sustainably.
The answer is yes. Yes, one should.
Refs:
1. [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jiec.12371]
2. [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412019315752?via%3Dihub]
3. [https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2019/09/23/costo-moda-medio-ambiente]
4. [https://carboncatalogue.coclear.co/?sector=Home%20durables%2C%20textiles%2C%20%26%20equipment&company=Levi%20Strauss%20%26%20Co.&year=2015&sort=sector]
5. [https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm]
6. [https://bit.ly/3mLCKbh (EPA.gov)]
7. [https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=30712]
8. https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/documents/us-ghg-inventory-2020-main-text.pdf
9. [https://css.umich.edu/factsheets/carbon-footprint-factsheet]
I don't get how this is either a non-sequitor, or entirely missing the point. The figure of 60% household consumption is just an arbitrary split between different categories. Every emission source (except volcanoes) exists because it directly or indirectly serves household consumption. Some factories make things used in households, others make things used in factories used to make things used in households, and so forth. The military exists to defend households, universities to educate household members, and so on without obvious exception.
It's not like people are 60% and reptiloids are the other 40; everything is people.
No doubt you or I could come up with a proposal as to how, for example, US households could be defended adequately with less than the emissions of the current US military. But that is not very different in principle from a plan to build renewable or nuclear power plants; it's an institutional level decision.
In contrast, when you look at individual, not institutional choices, things are on a different scale. Not because the institutions are not made of people, but because an individual decision only directly affects a household's worth of people. It's just that if enough people make those choices, that changes things.
The message implicit in Scott's numbers is that for many middle class Americans, the most meaningful and effective individual decision they can make may well be to purchase some form of carbon offsets. Your actual objection to that seems to be mostly on religious or aesthetic ('indulgences', 'consumerism') grounds. Which, however valid or persuasive they may or may not be, have absolutely nothing to do with all the numbers and facts in your 9 footnotes. The fact that you feel otherwise seems to suggest that you fail to understand the nature of the argument you are attempting to make.
"It's just that if enough people make those choices, that changes things."
Yes, so why do you dismiss making individual changes to reduce emissions? I'm fairly sure the argument of "I am a single person, my action on its own won't make any difference" has been comphresively demolished when it comes to voting, so treating reducing emissions as different seems silly.
The argument actually being made is that one of the individual actions available to be taken is individually deciding to purchase carbon offsets. If 10% of the people nationally take that action with 50% effectiveness, that solves 5% of the problem at that scale. Which is not nothing, and might have room to plausibly scale up. US consumer spending is 14 _trillion_, 1% of that would buy a lot of trees and/or carbon blocks.
There are obviously lots of other individual actions you could propose adding to Scott's table, and I doubt he would object if you actually did the work to calculate what they could be.
This is all orthogonal to the question of whether institutional changes are necessary; I suspect everyone involved would agree they are, if not exactly which ones.
It would, admittedly, become moot if planned institutional changes were _sufficient_; that would seem a hard argument to make.
The current potential for purchasing legit carbon offsets doesn't come close to the scale of potential reductions from behavior changes. Scott's gold standard, Climeworks, has *total* capacity for 2021 that offsets the car exhaust of merely 727 Americans (4k mt CO2). And anyway, no one believes that offsets are a replacement for actual emissions reductions; at best it buys us a little more runway.
> There are obviously lots of other individual actions you
> could propose adding to Scott's table, and I doubt he
> would object if you actually did the work to calculate
> what they could be.
I've given several examples with "the work", but that's beside the point. The problem is that he's done an analysis with gross omissions, presented it in a misleading way, and dissuaded people from considering they have a responsibility to make any lifestyle modifications, characterizing it as "obsessing" and "giving up too many of the things that you enjoy." The post can't be redeemed with a couple late additions to the tables.
> The current potential for purchasing legit carbon offsets doesn't come close to the scale of potential reductions from behavior changes. Scott's gold standard, Climeworks, has *total* capacity for 2021 that offsets the car exhaust of merely 727 Americans
It would likely grow quickly if there would be enough people to exhaust the current supply
> "household consumption is just an arbitrary split"
No. The basic fact you're missing is that household consumption is by and for a specific individual. It is consumption that would not occur if not for individual, and is a directly influenced by that individual's decisions and behaviors. (More accurately, a small group of individuals, 2.5 on average.)
Since the central question of this post is, "What are the responsibilities of an ordinary citizen facing the threat of climate change?" and 60% of GHG emissions can be influenced by individual choices, I assert that the responsibilities of the individual citizen must include making better choices to reduce their contribution to the problem.
> The message implicit in Scott's numbers is that for many middle class Americans, the most meaningful and effective individual decision they can make may well be to purchase some form of carbon offsets.
Read again more closely, and you'll see that I showed that individual choices he dismisses and omits can actually make a significant difference. And I only gave a couple examples out of the many facets.
As for carbon offsets, let's take Scott's recommendation as the best available option, Climeworks. They have a single facility. It has a total CO2 capture capacity of 4,000 mt/Y. That's 727 American drivers' cars' annual output. So what do we do about the other 225 million American drivers?
The scale of carbon offset offerings simply is not sufficient to support Scott's recommendation. Maybe it will be in 5? 10? 15? years, but it's not practical advice today.
Let's wave a magic wand to set that aside and say it is possible. Is it really so much more reasonable or practical than the other options available to an ordinary citizen that they're not even worth considering?
Take an average household: 2 drivers x 13.5k mi driven per year each, results in 11 metric tons CO2 emitted per year from driving.
Option A: Spend $1000 to offset 1 metric ton of that CO2 with Climeworks.
Option B: Reduce the amount they drive by 9%. About half of all US car trips are 3 mi or less; 20% are less than 1 mile! Walk or take a bike instead. Carpool or take transit 1 day a week. Etc. That lifestyle change is free AND persists year after year. They might even like it!
Option C: Do both! These are not mutually exclusive!
And in fact there are many other areas–heating/cooling, food, consumer goods, etc–in which one can make a meaningful change through modest personal effort and little to no sacrifice or cost, that can be combined.
Therefore, Scott's recommendation is inadequate and he has discarded other possibilities based on faulty premises. His case rests on numbers that are incomplete and misleading, and the only action he suggests that actually results in CO2 reduction is nowhere near the necessary scale to be a real option today. There *are* modest changes individuals can make that will make a meaningful difference in aggregate, and we all indeed have a responsibility to do so.
For weight loss, exercise works for some people, for others dieting alone works, and similarly for both and neither. It's kind of natural for anyone talking about the potential benefits of one to be seen as attacking the other solution, no matter how many caveats they state and how much careful wording they use. And certainly it is very easy to come up with wrong numbers that lead to the wrong conclusion about what the trade-offs are.
The thing is, that rough symmetry does seem to break down when you stop looking at two individual options and go back to looking at things at a societal level. 9% of people individually choosing to cut their consumption by 9% rounds to 0. At that level, it is not incremental progress towards a a solution, it is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
If, instead, half that number chose to become early adopters of electric cars, carbon offsets, or any other potential green technology, then you have a new multi-billion dollar industry researching and developing ways to scale that up.
Only political activism has the same potential to drive, not follow, societal level change.
Driving 9% less was cited as it is the CO2 reduction equivalent to spending $1000/year on carbon capture.
Thus if you believe that driving 9% less is "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic", then ipso facto buying carbon offsets is as well.
Thankfully, that premise is wrong.
* Driving 9% less not the practical or absolute limit for reductions from driving less.
* "9% of people" is arbitrary and begs the question. Of course individual change is pointless if it remains niche
* Your math is wrong. 9% of 9% rounds to 1%, not 0.
* Of course it has to start somewhere, and leading by example is important. Individual changes expand through a social contagion effect.
* "He's still doing it!" is a 5yo's argument against behaving responsibly.
And again, there are myriad other possibilities for individual reductions that are practical and have a meaningful scale, today. Legit carbon offsets are perhaps worth supporting, but they currently only exist at a trivial scale so cannot be treated as a meaningful option for immediate reductions.
> when you stop looking at two individual options
I have been quite clear that I am only providing a few counterexamples which are alone sufficient to invalidate Scott's assertion that there are no individual changes ordinary citizens should consider taking. I am not proposing a comprehensive alternative set of recommendations, merely proving that this ain't it, chief.
The unfortunate truth is that the climate crisis has progressed far beyond the point where can bet on nascent technologies to alleviate the immediate need for us to face the consequences of our actions and amend them accordingly.
> Thus if you believe that driving 9% less is "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic", then ipso facto buying carbon offsets is as well.
The third paragraph of my comment above explicitly explains why this may well not be the case.
> Scott's assertion that there are no individual changes ordinary citizens should consider taking
This is contained in which numbered paragraph of Scott's post? Certainly, I seem to be unable to find it.
In contrast, table #2 contains a list of 11 potential changes, ranging from meaningful to trivial, which different people will find affordable and feasible to different extents. Is there some number of additional entries in that table, or perhaps a different choice of font or formatting, that would have led you to not base your argument on the premise it does not exist?
> far beyond the point where can bet on nascent technologies to alleviate the immediate need for us to face the consequences of our actions and amend them accordingly.
I would reverse that statement, and I believe the numbers support me. However, there is not much point in going into the details of that argument unless you can show a greater willingness to attempt to read what is already written.
Is there a good article that overviews carbon capture technologies or the companies that are working on it?
You guys need to read moldbugs take on climate change, it’s fake and not worth worrying about
Climeworks charges $1000 / ton? Why not grow ironwood, then barge it out into the ocean and sink it. Surely that could sequester a ton for less than a thousand bucks.
How do these costs per lb compare to those imposed by the EU's ETS and the proposed CBAM?
Current ETS spot is ~56 EUR, with 1 to 3 year futures at 57-59 EUR. That gives about 3c a lb, or $66 per tonne, about 4 times the 'optimistic' and 6% of the 'pessimistic'.
I realise this may have been addressed in part. But the best question is not ‘how would MY carbon reduction compare with an F14/the Us military/China?’. It’s ‘how would OUR carbon reduction compare?’. It would be helpful if you could to include some rough multiplication factors for various total populations to allow people to estimate the sum-in-aggregate. For example I’ve had a stab using the data here (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/first-world-countries). I tried to take a middle line about the eventual outcome. Taking only the top 30 most developed countries (Norway down to Estonia) totals just over 1Bn population in 2021. Assuming that only one-third of people in those countries can be convinced, eventually, to significantly change their habits gives a multiplication factor to your ‘lifestyle’ column of roughly 340 million. If those 340m people completely decarbonise, by your figures, it would reduce carbon use by nearly 11,000 Bn lbs CO2 per year - bigger than any single emitter on the list except China. Does this not suggest the benefit of finding incentives to persuade the most receptive people to act as a collective?
I'm really looking forward to your article on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
If mining one bitcoin costs $38,000 does that mean that per Open Thread 166 (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-166), you donated $380,000 after selling your NFT?
Does the figure for the carbon for the USA include the carbon for the US military?
If I’m not mistaken there is an error in lifestyle changes table at top of the post, it should be 2F colder all winter instead of warmer.
He fixed it.
I'd support a pigouvian tax on carbon emissions (and all other forms of pollution) where the proceeds are given back as UBI. That's really the only policy that's needed on climate, aside from getting out of the way of private industry that wants to build nuclear/renewables. (Zoning/HOAs need to stop prohibiting solar roofs in some places).
But I strongly object to a lot of the apocalyptic rhetoric of some. Cities are thriving right now in temperatures ranging from -40C to +50C. It's absurd that humans wouldn't be able to cope with the difference between 2C and 4C globally.
This paper estimates 4434 tons of carbon offset to save one life: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24487-w
If we assume for the sake of argument that's true, and we also use Scott's median $100/ton carbon offset cost, then it costs $434,400 to save one life through carbon offsets. That's a couple orders of magnitude worse than malaria nets.
Does anyone know of an estimation which carbon prices a given carbon cap (from an Emission Trading Scheme) entails? Or vice-versa: how a given carbon price from a carbon tax would influence emissions? this relation seems vital to me, yet I havn't seen any study on it.
More specifically, economists would have to study how a certain carbon price (from a tax or a trading scheme) influences the demand for each economic good (apples, meat, concrete, gas, electricity...). Finally, they would have to add up how much carbon is produced by the remaining consumtion. This is vitally important for answering the "social question" of how much poor people will be priced out of carbon production.
If it costs $100 to offset a ton of CO2, then a ton of CO2 should be taxed $100. Each gallon of gas produces 19.6 pounds of CO2. This implies a gas tax around $1 per gallon. But as discussed above, there are wide error bars around the cost of offsets, and there could be economies/diseconomies of scale.
I find the idea of sequestering carbon "permanently" such a turn-off. It's not just that it's a waste of a valuable resource. There's something like a kind of a biological nihilism about it, or at the very least, a sweeping, nonchalant, ignorance about the implied risks.
Imagine we had massive permanent-sequestration capability and then, I dunno, accidentally left it running one weekend, taking global atmospheric CO2 below ~100ppm. The result would be dinosaur-extinction-astroid-impact level destructive. Except worse, because now that the carbon is inorganic and inaccessible, life is not going to just sort of... bounce back.
Obviously nobody is actually trying to scrub every last molecule from the atmosphere, but my problem is that people are starting to act as though CO2 basically nuclear waste. All downside. I reckon if you ask a bunch of 20-somethings who've been steeped in this there whole lives, "what is the ideal level of CO2", a significant fraction will say "zero".
Even if "permanent" doesn't mean "irreversible" sequestration, it seems irresponsible to be treating the carbon cycle as something that can be "shorted to ground", to use a random electrical metaphor.
It's sci-fi until it isn't. When we do develop planetary-scale sequestration capability, it seems pretty obvious we'll have to treat it like a nuclear arsenal. (It's the same with most other geohacking ideas.)
*is, *their. :(
In what sense is carbon a *valuable* resource? I mean, yes, there are useful things you can do with it. But it's not at all in short supply, and if we want more we know where to get it without too much difficulty. And the particular form of carbon that we are proposing to sequester is a particularly odious form, that does us some level of harm if we just leave it lying around and is particularly difficult to turn into anything useful. It is not unreasonable to sequester *that* carbon, while keeping a map of all the places we can go and just dig up much more useful forms of carbon if we find we need more.
Also, we are pretty much by definition proposing to sequester carbon in places we can actually reach, and we're not even putting much effort into making it inaccessible - we're just trying to make it not quite so easily accessible that some passing blob of algae will snarf it up and deposit randomly into the biosphere. So if we really want that particular carbon back, we can go get it without too much trouble.
CO2 is not the odious form from the perspective of photosynthetic life i.e. the root of our food chain. It's the only useful form! You may be one of those who would say "zero" is the ideal atmospheric level. But think about what happens to life under (anything like) those circumstances. You could start with a Google search for "CO2 concentration plant growth rate".
As for the rest, I did note that permanent does not have to mean irreversible -- but my point was that *marketing* it as permanent is a bit of a turn-off if you have the slightest bit of interest in the biosphere (...as something other than an engineering challenge).
I wish we could add at least one traditional bank to the list. I have friends who are into bitcoin, and when someone mentions how carbon intensive BTC is, they counter that it's equivalent to the carbon use of other common ways that people invest or save their money.
I could see that Bitcoin people believe that, but it doesn't make it true.
Some cryptocurrencies are orders-of-magnitude less energy intensive. It's doubtful they're really all about the same as traditional banking or investments[1].
[1] And I've got a bad feeling that the "investment" is something like "well your index fund invests in an oil company."
The train trip LA -> New York seems way too high in cost. The train is supposed to be the most efficient way to travel after bicycle. Also, the native.eco calculator Scott linked as the source states 0.28 carbon tons for the trip.
How to Stop Global Warming
https://link.medium.com/ZHBBPwtL7ib
Awesome! I've been researching this a lot recently and have some information to share:
I recommend donating to founderspledge.com/funds/climate-change-fund instead of catf. They are a fund that transfers the money to a portfolio of non profits after thorough analysis, including catf.
I've been able to get a lot of my friends to donate, I think that with simple enough explanations it's possible to get a large portion of the western population to donate. I think most people care about climate change, but most of them don't know what to do to help. My current recommendation is donating %1 of income - It's an easy to swallow amount that allows high income individuals to offset tens of people.
My best estimate of the price of carbon offset is ~$5/ton (order of magnitude), when donating to founders pledge. In their 2018 research founders pledge estimates that for catf it's 0.1-1$/ton. The greenclimate.fund claim they abated approximately 1.8 billion tons with 8.9 billion dollars of funding - that's $5/ton. I assume they are less effective than catf, and that also they might have exaggerated the carbon amount. Other estimates (such as those in the post) are higher than $5. I remember vaguely that investing in solar is about $20-30/ton, if it's important to someone I'll find the source.
The fundamental assumption that "people existing is bad for the climate" is not just wrong; it's completely backwards.
Everything good that our civilization will ever create in the future, including climate change solutions, will be created by people. And to create good things, people need resources. The fewer children we (as a civilization) have, the fewer people there will be to create things. And, just as importantly, the less economic growth there will be to provide resources for that creation.
The fewer children we have, the less likely we are to ever solve ANY major problem, of which climate change is just one (looking at you, asteroids). And that's not just because a small number of children might grow up to individually do import things for the climate, a la Elon Musk; Tesla could never have succeeded without solid and affordable access to raw materials, supply chains, investors, talent pools, capital, customers, business services, contractors, etc. (And in fact, think how much more effective Tesla, and maybe a non-existent competitor or two, could be right now if the economy were much bigger, giving them access to much superior resources).
More children = more chances for an hypothetical future-problem-solver to be born. But far more relevant and less wishy-washy is: more children = more economic growth = more resources for the many not-hypothetical-problem-solvers to utilize.
Solving climate change will require a lot of new knowledge and new technology. It will also require the expenditure of a huge amount of wealth. The more wealth we have to spare, the better the odds are that we'll be willing to spend some of it on this problem.
Greatly increasing immigration from developing countries to developed ones would help in the same way; by migrating, people gain better access to resources, which makes them more productive. And there are also plenty of humanitarian reasons to support more migration. This is often used as a counter-argument to having more children, saying that we should favor immigration instead. Let's put aside the fact that this makes no sense in its own terms, given that migrating to the developed world increases a person's carbon footprint more-or-less in proportion to how much it increases their productivity. But increasing immigration and increasing birth rate have basically nothing to do with each other, and there's no reason why favoring one would imply not favoring the other. I think we should favor both.
Just as an addendum: the only reason to care about climate change at all is because it will negatively affect humans (even if the most apocalyptic predictions all came true and humanity was wiped out, there's no universe in which the biosphere itself would fail to recover). So really our choices are: have more kids, and solve climate change; or stop having kids, and don't fucking bother.
One number really impressed me, and it must be kind of a blind spot that nobody here addressed it here by now:
Assuming these numbers are correct, the US military is responsible for 1/4 of all US emissions. 3 times the UK. This is just insane.
This means for me that every politician (or even person) who worries about climate change but does not call for a substantial reduction of the US-Military can not be taken serious.
It impressed me too - so much it seemed implausible to me.
So I followed source 29 (and the paper source 29 cited). Both [29] and the paper[p] behind it give a figure of 1.2 billion metric tons (2.65 trillion lbs, nearly the 2.4 trillion lbs of Scott's table) - but for 2001-2017. If we correct for that it's a more plausible 1,5-2% of US emissions - a lower share of emissions than it's 3,7% [mil/gdp] share of GDP interestingly.
[mil/gdp]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266892/military-expenditure-as-percentage-of-gdp-in-highest-spending-countries/
[p]: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2019/Summary_Pentagon%20Fuel%20Use%2C%20Climate%20Change%2C%20and%20the%20Costs%20of%20War%20%281%29.pdf
ps this is my first post here so if I should do something differently for other posts (structure? links?) I'd be thankful for any hints.
To produce one ton of anything in one year, someone or something would have to produce more than six pounds in every second in that year. (There are 31,556,952 seconds in one Gregorian year. There are 2,000 pounds in one ton. 31,556,952 seconds divided by 2,000 pounds equals 6.337 pounds per seconds. How much would a bull have to weigh to produce to produce that much fecal matter every second it is alive?
For those interested in buying Climeworks at https://climeworks.com/subscriptions, it costs $30 per month to remove 20kg of CO2 a month, or a cost of around $1,400 per ton. Sorry, prices haven't fallen since the 3 years this was posted.