I'm sure people are frustrated, but I wonder what the consensus, if you could fine one, would be.
What exactly are they expecting governments to change? Policy, power generation, transportation, what? And will they accept the necessary or resultant policies and changes?
The above are "easy" if you have a totalitarian regime where what the autocrats say go, goes: China, Saudi Arabia, etc., most other countries are more democratic and it takes time for change to happen.
Tax carbon. Use cross border tariffs to prevent offshoring emissions. People will then make the economically rational decision to use public transportation, buy EVs, put solar on the roof, insulate their homes, buy heat pumps, and eat less meat.
Carbon taxes look like a useful tool; I wonder what the unforeseen drawbacks and consequences might be.
Will people redefine what carbon is; who will suffer, how many people will lose jobs due to electrification of many industries (auto MFG for one, the UFW, is concerned). What happens to the third world where they use charcoal for cooking?
Except it simply won't happen because people will not stand for everything becoming more expensive and inconvenient. They will not vote for people who will enact these policies.
Yeah, I'm afraid we're didn't do the right thing when the Saudis extorted the world for more expensive energy. Instead of making dirty deals with them, we should have sought policies to end reliance on them, but we couldn't and no one could. But were in the same place. And we can thank Jane Fonda for killing the one thing that could have removed that albatross from out necks.
Government might not be the solution here. I look at electric cars and soon they will require less maintenance, less money for fuel and be cheaper than their ICE counterparts. If you build something that emits less CO2 and it is BETTER and CHEAPER than the competition it's game over. No one but hobbyists will look at ICE again.
This to me aligns with economic theory in practice more accurately than a carbon tax.
Internalizing negative externalities through taxation is literally Economics 101. That's not to say that that makes a carbon tax inherently a good idea (though I think it is), but there's nothing economically unsound about it and there's a reason lots of economists support it.
Taxes are taught in economics 101, but tax evasion is not: drive across state lines, shop online, under report activity, buy on the black market, etc. You need a strong enforcement mechanism in place that's often hand waived away. When I studied economics (2006) the theory was brilliant but always fell short of delivering in practice.
People won't evade buying cars that produce less CO2 if they're cheaper and better than the competition. This is why I think it's more likely to align with economic theory.
> I'm sure people are frustrated, but I wonder what the consensus, if you could fine one, would be.
Probably despair that they've been failed by my generation, my parent's generation and (since they're to a large extent the ones still in power, at least in the US), my grandparent's generation. Since, as you point out, change takes time in democracies, and even longer internationally, it was our collective jobs to avoid even being in this situation, and we sort of screwed the pooch.
Let's say people in the 70s knew climate change was happening. That it was the prevailing consensus and had the necessary evidence.
What were governments supposed to do? What technology were they going to leverage? did we have computers, modelling, alternatives?
Cars with ICE could have become more efficient, yes. But where else could we have cut the fat? Fewer people via worldwide contraception, to stem demand? More public transit? Much of carbon output is not on the consumer side, but on the industry side of things.
The antinuke activists killed green energy which would have make coal and other dirty power obsolete. That would have been a nice chunk.
I don't think we had the technology back then to do much about it. We could have slowed it down a bit, but not stop it.
In the US, we could have built cities and suburbs which did not necessitate owning an ICE vehicle (at least for the majority of residents). We could have pushed the development of electric cars, which were certainly plausible in the 90s. We (the US gov't) could've stopped subsidizing fossil fuels. Heck, with the end of the cold war, the US could've substantially cut military spending, which accounts for a rather non-trivial portion of the nation's carbon emissions. More generally, we could've taxed carbon emissions to correctly account for the externalities they generated (which it was certainly possible to compute in the 70s: the energy companies themselves were doing it!), which would've likely shifted land use away from cattle, energy generation away from coal, &c.
These are things which are, quite clearly, at least an order of magnitude less than what we need to accomplish today, but since climate change is caused by the area under the emissions curve, perhaps that 50 year head start would've been enough. With the benefit of hindsight, it certainly would've been worthwhile to give it more of a try than what we actually did.
>Let's say people in the 70s knew climate change was happening.
The broad understanding of it was known in the late 70s, and even accepted by politicians by the early 80s as a policy requirement before it became politicised later.
>I don't think we had the technology back then to do much about it. We could have slowed it down a bit, but not stop it.
If you think of the massive exponential growth of oil/gas consumption and the level of deforestation since the 70s - even just slowing it down back then would've bought a much longer window of time to tackle it with less disruption as well as develop technologies to help fix/mitigate it.
another issue is that changing something, greenhouse gas let's say, is harder on the margin. The first improvements are cheap, the later ones aren't. Looking at an EPA webpage, I see that current per capita US CO2 emissions are about 65% of the 1970 levels.
I can certainly see some of the problems. The real increases are in India/China. Union of Concerned Scientists shows that US share of worldwide CO2 is 15%, even a solid change is only a fraction of 15%. A lot of solutions (nuclear, fracking of natgas to replace coal, cutting immigration from the Third World to the First, etc.) are politically unpopular with climate activists. World population is supposed to peak at 50% higher than current level. GDP improvements (and energy use) could easily outstrip improvements in efficiency. etc. etc.
oh well, no one is asking me to run their lives so I'll just sit back and watch.
What exactly are they expecting governments to change? Policy, power generation, transportation, what? And will they accept the necessary or resultant policies and changes?
The above are "easy" if you have a totalitarian regime where what the autocrats say go, goes: China, Saudi Arabia, etc., most other countries are more democratic and it takes time for change to happen.