10 years ago when I still lived in CA (where i grew up), I was the liberal rebel in my family of CA Republicans, I argued with my grandfather (who was still alive at the time) about the issue of Global Warming but rather than trying to take him on head on about the ethical nature of supporting it, I tried to take the approach of talking about Electric Cars and how Elon Musk was paving the way towards a future where nobody would need to use fossil fuels anymore. (this was back when Tesla was still pretty much a pitch)

He asked me how much would a new Tesla cost? I said well right now they are $120k, but eventually Elon Musk plans to get that price all the way down to $40k.

My grandfather said, he can go right now and buy a 4 cylinder truck for $2000 dollars that gets 25 miles to the gallon and with gas at $3 a gallon he could literally get 360,000 miles out of a vehicle, and then guess what buy another truck for $2000 dollars for the same amount of money it took to buy a 40k electric car...

His argument was very simple, and having moved to Oklahoma after the economy crashed in 2007, I understand now more than ever why his conservative pov was correct.

The reality is that you can't make the world conform to your utopia when it first conforms to its budget.

You think this issue can be solved with simply a 10% reduction each year, when you need to realize people don't buy gas because they are going on family trips all the time they can choose to do the right thing and cut back on.

People are buying gas to go to work and back everyday. Literally the only way we could cut back on our current fossil fuel usage is if Andrew Yang's worst nightmare came to fruition and the robots did take all the jobs, that way we didn't have to commute to work everyday.

You need to think about why people need gas to go to work and back every day. They do this because their work is located far away from their home. And why is that? Because it was economically viable to set it up like that, because of the low price of gas.

Increase the price of gas, and you will get an economic recession in the short term, for sure. But after that, people will adjust, and you will see a reversal of the current trend of centralizing all jobs in the big cities. Towns would get more local businesses, people doing business would invest more in high-quality video conferencing instead of traveling to meetings by plane all the time, and so on. Some things that are possible today would not be possible anymore, and we would have to deal with that.

I think it is a fallacy to see the current way society works as a constant. Everything is holistically connected, and if you change one variable (price of fossil fuels), then the rest of society will have to shape itself around that.

You would get lynched by taxi drivers within the first month of implementing such a ridiculous policy.

You would get lynched by everybody! But we have to realize that anything we do to solve climate change is going to make our living conditions worse here and now, because we have spent the last century making every aspect of society dependent on fossil fuels.

I think it is also ridiculous to not do something, because we know what the outcome is going to be, and it is almost certainly going to be more unpleasant than an economic recession and a bunch of pissed off taxi drivers.

Edit: Also, note that I do not want to increase the price of gas through a policy affecting only gas for cars, e.g. via taxation. That will never work, because it is a local policy that will be a short-term loss for the first country to implement it. I want to limit the extraction of fossil fuels globally, causing the short-term losses to be distributed to every nation in the world which depends on fossil fuels. This will, as a consequence, cause gas prices to increase.

Mandate taxis to be zero emission. Which is coming for some big urbs.

Unless Americans start accepting that all of this is down to POLITICAL CHOICES we get nowhere. America has by choice built a car centric society where people like your grandfather HAVE TO buy a car and drive around.

Until I actually lived in the US, I did not grasp why Americans were always driving and why they could not use say public transportation. When I lived in the US I realized that almost EVERY American city was planned in a way that made driving a car very nice, but walking or public transportation was made to be absolutely terrible.

You cannot solve this problem with an individualist approach where you assume some Messiah like Elon Musk will just produce a magical product that will save everybody. There is no way around making political choices.

Of course I see this is hard to achieve in a country where politics is broken and it is normal to think the government is evil and should not be trusted.

That is why I think the top priority in the US ought to be fixing its political system. Get money out of politics. More transparency. Change the laws to facilitate multiple parties. Get away from the toxic two party system. Just voting on a 3rd party today does not do that as your vote is wasted. You need to actually change how the voting works otherwise multiple parties are not possible. Use preferential voting or proportional voting system e.g.

False. Scientists and economist have proposed to introduce carbon pricing, which would increase the prices of fossil fuels and oil, without forcing any utopian ideas, by simply including the cost of fighting the effects of global warming in the prices of fossil fuels and oil: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/bxgd5p/single_mo...

Except he couldn't have gotten a $2k truck for 25 mpg back then and it would've been spewing emissions onto asthmatic children wherever he drove.

That's why I use electric scooter to work. It costs 300$ and I spend 1$ a month on electricity to charge it (I could charge at work). It's an 10X improvement for short distance travel. It's much cheaper and convenient, since I don't wait in traffic and I don't have to worry about parking. The only drawbacks are: less immune to the weather, it could be hard to take it into some places like restaurants and you can't transport heavy or large stuff.

This is what a price on carbon and carbon taxes are intended to address.

As the price of use or production of carbon rises, it will spur investment and competition in alternative forms of energy.

Further, a tax credit for removing carbon from the atmosphere will help spur removal technologies and we can begin to make a dent in everything that's already in the atmosphere.

We also need taxing of emissions to curb emissions of other greenhouse gases (mostly methane) that are not tied directly to the burning of fossil fuels. For example emissions from household animals, drained farmland and so on.

The problem with these kinds of taxation systems is that they are really difficult to enforce, because you need a way to measure the amount of greenhouse gas emitted by each individual business.

Taxation of emissions is another tool in the toolbox, but we also need to guarantee that the consumption of fossil fuels is decreasing at the same time. Taxation may help, but it provides no guarantee of that.

Once oil producers have to pay the carbon tax, the consumption will go down, because the price of oil will go up.

Absolute AGREE!!! Why are so few others pointing this out!!

If oil was heroin, our current approach is like telling heroin dealers to keep pushing their drugs, but put all the onus on the junkies to stop buying so much of the heroin. It is TOTALLY backwards!

I am saying this as someone who benefits immensely from living in an oil producing country (Norway).

We are f...ing expanding our oil production while building windmills to make our oil production "cleaner." Everybody in Norway seems to be patting themselves on the back that we are reaching our climate goals by reducing emissions from oil production. Never mind that those emissions are like 1% of the emissions from actually burning the oil.

But that problem we leave to the buys. It is infuriating.

My proposal to win over fellow Norwegians is that we join an oil Cartel like OPEC. We then lobby OPEC to become a cartel for green change. All oil producers agree to begin gradual reductions in output.

This will cause the price to go up, so Norway and other will not get the big economic hit that is making it politically unpopular to reduce oil production. It also means all oil producers share they burden.

Oil consumers will then have to start reducing their consumption because oil will get more expensive. This ought to be a win-win situation.

Because the extractors of fossil fuels drives significant portions of the economy and we’d have to change how we measure things. Plus the amount of money they throw around. Much of the time they’re the only industry in poor or underdeveloped regions, and we have no real way to deal with the economic impact.

Good, this means we have now identified the real problem that we need to solve. In any case, if we really believed that we could succeed in just limiting our emissions without enforcing a scarcity of fossil fuels, that would lead to a drastic reduction in demand anyway, which would have the same economic impact on said poor and underdeveloped regions. These regions are also going to be the ones most affected by climate change, so they will lose big time either way.

I am not saying that this is fair, but no approach is really going to be fair to everyone. At least by ripping the band-aid off, we will (1) make actual, concrete progress, and (2) make it explicit who is going to suffer (the poor and underdeveloped regions that depend on fossil fuel production) and that we as a world are responsible for ensuring the affected people a livelihood.

Humans are much better at dealing with problems related to scarcity, as this causes us to really think about how to make things more efficient. If good advice about how to reduce your personal consumption for your own good really worked, then we would have a western world populated by fit and healthy Greek gods, but we don't: we have an obesity epidemic because it is not in the human nature to limit your consumption even if you have all the information about how to do it available to you.

Now, the real big problem is how to enforce this yearly reduction in fossil fuel production. I don't know, but I can think of one way involving the immediate threat of instant sunshine followed by nuclear winter. At least this is a kind of threat that humans can better relate to.

> I don't know, but I can think of one way involving the immediate threat of instant sunshine followed by nuclear winter. At least this is a kind of threat that humans can better relate to.

Would you clarify who should threaten who in your scenario? Just FYI, US is now the biggest oil producer in the world.

I am aware that this is not a realistic course of action. The problem is that scaling down fossil fuel production is going to be a very bad economic decision for any country in the short term, and it seems to be difficult, politically, to take that local economic hit for the long term interests of humanity at a global scale. At least the immediate threat of nuclear repercussions would convert the alternative into a short term local risk, which is politically more palatable.

Of course, any nuclear nation threatening other nations like that would become a pariah, so it isn't likely to happen. Also because, as you say, it is against their own short-term economic interests.

Edit: It would be pretty ironic if North Korea, which is already a pariah, turned out to save the planet by taking on that role.

I think if we had some sort of catalyst to enable more economic opportunities for both rural and fossil fuel oriented areas, then we could easily nudge things in the right direction.

IMO - a remote work revolution would work for that. Basic income as well.

A remote work revolution would happen as a necessity in a world where fossil fuel availability would suddenly and drastically get reduced. I think that transformation would be relatively uncontroversial, and would probably lead to an increase in production because people wouldn't be forced to sit in open office spaces anymore. However, we have to realize that this is only viable for the relatively small subset of us who work in offices.

I wouldn't say "poor or underdeveloped", rather the economic factors are different in the middle of the country vs the coastal parts of it.

Obviously anywhere connected to the ocean benefits from the fact that they are the first place a cargo ship goes when importing goods into America. It's because of this reason alone that the coastal states just so happen to be tech hubs.

Silicon Valley exists not because every engineer in the world 70 years ago thought it would be nice to live on a crowded little peninsula that has always had extremely over inflated real estate prices relative to the national avg (trust me, my Grandpa and Aunt were both big in the real estate game in the bay way back then)

The reason why they all moved there was because A. The cheapest silicon you can get in America is located where it comes right of the dock. B Because that is true for every imported good, coincidentally the easiest place to find people with an abundance of cash just so happens to be where all the people involved heavily in international trade are doing business.

My point is, you say "under developed" without taking into consideration two realities.

1. You don't want to live in a california with 150 million people in it.

2. states like oklahoma and texas can only survive by exporting the few goods they can produce. Namely green house gas problem sectors like livestock and oil production.

I live in oklahoma. Literally 5/10 men who actually take care of their families around here are doing so by driving trucks across country or pulling black gold out of the ground. The only way these areas could become "more developed" is if all of you did the actual caring thing (and actually smart thing btw) and started building your billion dollar unicorn startups all over the country.

There is no reason why Facebook couldn't be HQ in Texas, Amazon in Utah, Apple in Nashville (hey i think steve jobs would have liked that) twitch in North carolina, twitter in Maine, etc etc etc.

Because literally the only thing tech needs is internet connection. If were going to talk about ignorance of reality lets start with our own hypocrisies. Because frankly I lived half of my life in California and I lived the other half in the bible belt.

I tend to miss both when i am in the other place.When im in oklahoma I miss California because that's where all my childhood friends are. And when i am in california i miss oklahoma because that is where all the polite people are.

> There is no reason why Facebook couldn't be HQ in Texas, Amazon in Utah, Apple in Nashville

I have one reason - access to employees, and a pipeline for more. The industry in Austin will always be just as big as the employee base + qualified college grad rate will supply, and not much larger.

Why can't they be remote? Every company has huge struggles with communication as they get larger, and start to spread out further and further. Until there ends up being a company that grows and sets an "example" for remote at actual "unicorn" scale. Then I think it could and probably will happen, probably in the next 10 years even. But not right at the current moment. Still, you have to consider where the executives + founders want to live, an oft underappreciated reason for companies doggedly sticking to the bay area.

> Why aren't we doing more to address the source of the problem: extraction of fossil fuels?

This is basically the same as asking why don't we do more to stop climate change. And the answer is the same. Because we the people don't demand it from our governments. Not hard enough anyway.

I think the demand for action is present and will only increase in the years to come, so I am not worried about that anymore, actually.

My question was more why this particular course of action is not taken? What are the main arguments against it, and can we do something to address those?

Same idea stated differently: the problem is the amount of carbon available at the planet's surface: a huge portion of that carbon will eventually end up as CO2, as that is the lowest energy state. Earth's biosphere allows for an equilibrium where part of that carbon will will be present as non-CO2 (i.e. biomass), but as we get more carbon to the surface, we'd have to move the equilibrium point to compensate for the added carbon, which doesn't seem to be a scalable solution.

The only scalable solution is to stop bringing up more carbon to the surface :)