This is a useful thread. I wanted to add a comment about the notion that "small prices don't work", to help people understand why even a modest carbon price will help drive change.
The key for determining what effect a price change will have on demand is the percentage change represented by that price change. This % is a function of the price of fuel and the carbon content of the fuel, to first order.
For industrial and utility applications (and also perhaps jet fuel) the fuel price per unit of energy content is relatively low and the carbon content relatively high (for coal especially) compared to consumer applications.
A simple illustration can help. A CO2 charge of $10/tonne will increase the cost of a coal plant by about 1 cent/kWh. That increases the variable costs of existing coal by about 25% (round numbers). That's huge.
Typical carbon prices in existence now are on the order of $20-40/tonne, so big enough to matter for coal fired electricity, increasing the cost of existing coal by 50-100% (price increases like that would drive coal generation to zero in short order in most places).
That same $10/tonne carbon charge will only affect consumer gasoline prices by 10 cents/gallon, which is very very small. Even changes of 20-40 cents/gallon using current CO2 charges won't affect demand much at all, because that's a roughly 10% change in price. Not much!
So small carbon charges can play a very important role in driving change in the electricity sector and industrial sectors in particular. They are not a silver bullet, but they would be very effective in reducing emissions from certain sectors /fin
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What these people fail to understand is that there IS a popular way to raise taxes: Tax very wealthy people a lot more and enforce the laws so wealthy people don't get away with avoiding taxes they should be paying.
Also get rid of the carried interest deduction and jack up inheritance taxes for estates starting in the hundreds of millions. All this would be VERY popular. It would affect a relatively small number of very wealthy people and would raise hundreds of billions of $ every year.
Armstrong McKay, et al. 2022. "Exceeding 1.5 C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points." Science. vol. 377, no. 6611. September 9. pp. eabn7950. [science.org/doi/abs/10.112…]
You weren't listening carefully enough to Kieren Mayer's presentation. Slide 14 shows total life cycle emissions including manufacturing of equipment and discs for three modes of gaming.
The key is that USE PHASE dominates in most cases, so your statement about "massive hardware emissions" doesn't track with reality, although in some use cases embedded emissions can be consequential.
My experience having collaborated with the Playstation folks for years in understanding environmental impacts is that they care very much about getting the numbers right. They show that by funding work that gets published in the peer reviewed literature, among other ways.
Also, many people don't know that lead is still allowed in aviation gasoline, because the FAA thinks "no safe alternative is currently available". faa.gov/news/fact_shee…
With the advent of electrified light planes, though, we now have a safe and superior alternative. cnn.com/travel/article…
Our rebuttal: Masanet, Eric, Arman Shehabi, Nuoa Lei, Harald Vranken, Jonathan Koomey, and Jens Malmodin. 2019. "Implausible projections overestimate near-term Bitcoin CO2 emissions." Nature Climate Change. vol. 9, no. 9. 2019/09/01. pp. 653-654. [doi.org/10.1038/s41558…]
We reproduced the authors' model almost exactly, so we know what they did. We showed that their conclusions made no sense in several ways, but the authors just denied the validity of our valid points in their riposte to our rebuttal.
Setting a coal phase-out date (2030 or sooner for developed countries) is the most important single step most nations can take on climate. Of course it's not the only necessary step, but it's a big one.
This is another example of a critically important constraint on the supply side (it's not just about reducing demand).
Green, Fergus, and Richard Denniss. 2018. "Cutting with both arms of the scissors: the economic and political case for restrictive supply-side climate policies." Climatic Change. 2018/03/12. [doi.org/10.1007/s10584…]