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Piles of Tesla owners stranded at charge stations abandons their EV's.
tom66:
--- Quote from: David Hess on January 20, 2024, 03:52:22 pm ---Now there is a solution based on economics, but politics prevents it in multiple ways. Simply apply the cost of the negative externalities of fossil fuels, which is another way of saying carbon tax. Scale it up over time to prevent economic disruption. The problems here however are just as intractable. Citizens do not trust the government to collect another tax without rent seeking, and politicians will not support it because it will not facilitate rent seeking.
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A solution that has been proposed in the past and implemented in a few areas, for personal taxes, is the so-called revenue neutral carbon tax.
Basic idea, everyone who files a tax return gets say $1,000 back every year. Everyone pays (say) 20c extra in fuel taxes. Maybe 2c extra per kWh of natural gas for heating, 3c extra per kWh of electricity... whatever the figures happen to be. So in the net, no one loses, the average taxpayer pays no more. But now you have an economic incentive to reduce that 20c by choosing a more efficient vehicle or an EV, or even by driving less. The return amount can be adjusted to take into account dependents and location if needed. The law that is introduced is that the tax must be revenue neutral, so that the amount returned at the end of the year is proportionate to the average amount collected.
Applied at a larger scale, carbon taxation is pretty much the only way we could get the technology we need developed in time to meet net zero. Capitalism works in mysterious ways but if there's a way to make money from it, people will. You could imagine for instance if we start offering (for instance) $1 per tonne of CO2 verifiably removed from the atmosphere that suddenly the investment in direct air capture would shoot up. Similarly applying a $1 per tonne tax on aviation CO2 would incentivise airlines to invest in other carbon neutral fuelling solutions (the EU are mandating SAF at a ratcheting percentage for air travel, which is a good start, but the wrong direction to approach it from IMO.)
Dan123456:
--- Quote from: David Hess on January 20, 2024, 03:52:22 pm ---
--- Quote from: Marco on January 20, 2024, 03:30:42 pm ---If you want net zero in 30 years in the west, everything has to happen in parallel. New major fossil fueled infrastructure and machinery needs to stop in the near future because it all needs to meet economic end of life by then (biofuel won't scale, synthetic fuel will be wildly expensive even in comparison to dealing with hydrogen).
If you give the rationalizers a finger, they will take off your arm. You have to force electrification + hydrogen and it all starts now, for 10% use, even for 1% use. Only the nichiest of niches can be allowed to imagine a future on biofuel or synthetic fuel. Otherwise everyone will and nothing will happen.
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The "needs to stop" plan will not work because of the economics which it ignores.
There are niche fossil fuel uses which cannot be currently replaced short of synthetic fuels, and the increased costs of synthetic fuels would be devastating. For an example I will pick farm equipment. We did the math a couple years ago on electric tractors and it was not feasible at any cost because of increased weight increasing ground pressure, which is already a problem, and if that was not enough, each tractor would require multiple heavy replaceable traction batteries, each of which costs more than an existing tractor. Is increasing capitol equipment costs by almost an optimistic order of magnitude acceptable? Do current solutions include the cost of famine?
Now there is a solution based on economics, but politics prevents it in multiple ways. Simply apply the cost of the negative externalities of fossil fuels, which is another way of saying carbon tax. Scale it up over time to prevent economic disruption. The problems here however are just as intractable. Citizens do not trust the government to collect another tax without rent seeking, and politicians will not support it because it will not facilitate rent seeking.
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Completely agree :)
I’m a big proponent of nuclear power for this reason :)
It’s not a 100% perfect alternative, but it is, in my mind, the best option we have between environmentally friendliness and realistic economics.
Coal isn’t great long term (I think pretty much everyone can agree to that to some degree) and renewables just aren’t currently reliable or economically feasible enough so if we started gradually replacing coal with nuclear now (and supplementing it with renewables), we could make some real difference without making electricity prices skyrocket through the roof or having to reinvent all transport and machinery :)
Marco:
--- Quote from: David Hess on January 20, 2024, 03:52:22 pm ---For an example I will pick farm equipment. We did the math a couple years ago on electric tractors and it was not feasible at any cost because of increased weight increasing ground pressure, which is already a problem, and if that was not enough, each tractor would require multiple heavy replaceable traction batteries, each of which costs more than an existing tractor. Is increasing capitol equipment costs by almost an optimistic order of magnitude acceptable? Do current solutions include the cost of famine?
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Did you know that there are warehouses doing the almost impossible task of running forklifts on hydrogen already? Without subsidy even. Given that it's literally too hard for rocket engineers, it's one of the greatest miracles of engineering of the last 100 years ... or the problems with hydrogen are hopelessly exaggerated.
Hydrogen fuel cell heavy machinery is close to commercialisation. It doesn't have quite the economic advantages of forklifts, so some mild force will be needed, but it ain't order of magnitudes.
Marco:
--- Quote from: Dan123456 on January 20, 2024, 05:11:52 pm ---I’m a big proponent of nuclear power for this reason :)
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Nuclear is orthogonal. Doesn't matter how cheap electricity is, synthetic fuel will be hopelessly expensive. Biofuel is cheap enough, but doesn't scale.
If you let industries just bungle on and pin your hopes on synthetic fuel or sequestration, net zero is a lost cause.
jonpaul:
Batteries activity like all chemical reactions are goverened by the Arrhenius equation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrhenius_equation
Thus for every 10 dge C or K fall in temperature, the activity is reduced by 1/2.
This applies universally, and batteries cvannot escape the result.
Less efficiency. less capacity by 1/2 for a 10 deg C or F decrease in T.
This is the reality, however much the ecoreligionists find it unpalatable.
Jon
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