Dutch guy wrote:Carbon tax doesn't work. People still need to drive to work, people still need to heat their homes. The tiny bit you can save by having the general public turn down the thermostat a bit or driving a few miles less is paltry.
Want to seriously affect the amount of carbon dioxides we produce? Build much more nuclear plants, stop international shipping of "small commercial products", stop building with concrete, etc. THEN you can get an effect. Joe public can generally do didly squat when it comes to saving on carbon emissions.
As to the article. ugggghhhhhh, just... how much overblown doomsday panic can you pack into an article? And all this doom and gloom is well and good, but this kind of article NEVER actually come with a solution or some actual new input.
Also, 2 degrees in the next 16 years? Meters ocean rise? How exactly?? Looking at the graphs they would need to make about a 90 degree bend and rise at ridiculously fast rates to achieve such numbers. It's just not going to happen.
Claiming those oil and gas reserves should be counted as, "ready to be consumed"? Also completely ridiculous. I know for a fact some of the reserves companies like Shell have on the balance won't be economically viable until the price of oil atleast doubles. They probably won't be extracting that oil for atleast another 50 years. A lot of the oil- and gasreserves on the books today are still "economic reserves" that won't be tapped until needed, and that could take decades.
Just, uggghhhhhhh, that whole article... it's so overblown.
While the tone of the article is perhaps a bit alarmist, it seems everything the article says is true.
I'm guessing carbon taxes haven't worked in large part because the countries that consume the most carbon-based fuels, like the US and China, refuse to implement them. Also, while people still need to heat their homes and drive to work, the point is to disincentivize it, not prevent it. Encouraging everyone to keep their thermostat one degree higher, etc.
I agree with you, though. Consumers aren't where the change has to happen. A carbon tax on companies that emit CO2 would have the biggest impact; it makes sense to me that companies should have to pay for the waste they emit. International shipping of small commercial products would naturally stop if the price became prohibitively expensive because the shipping companies or the companies that provided them with fuel had to pay a tax on it. More nuclear plants would also help.
Perhaps you didn't read carefully enough. The point of the article, which you seem to have missed, is not that a two degree rise in the next 16 years will cause the ocean to rise meters. It is that:
-a 2 degree rise will likely be enough to precipitate disastrous changes in climate patterns over the next few centuries, including record highs/lows that could cause crop problems, damaging floods, fires, etc, and eventually (much longer term) permanent sea level rise. Most everyone agrees on this. Chances are good it won't even take that much.
-in order to achieve that increase we know how much more carbon we'd need to put into the atmosphere. "The Earth's average surface temperature, expressed as a linear trend, rose by 0.74±0.18 °C over the period 1906–2005." and "Climate commitment studies indicate that even if greenhouse gases were stabilized at 2000 levels, a further warming of about 0.5 °C (0.9 °F) would still occur [over the next 100 years]." Which means we're already over half-way to the two degree mark. We can calculate how much more CO2 we'd have to introduce to push us there.
-We have that amount available to us, and companies are already acting as though they have it (borrowing against it, factoring it into their books) and they're looking for more, which means taking political action to change their behavior is going to be extremely difficult without incurring significant "financial loss" for those companies. And you can't say those reserves aren't "ready to be consumed." Tar sands in Canada and Venezuela are becoming economically viable. They've already started fracking for natural gas here in Pennsylvania, and they're increasing it in Ireland. As we burn through what's easy to get, prices will increase, motivating continued extraction of harder-to-reach sources. Also, as technology improves, those harder-to-reach sources will become easier to reach. But it doesn't matter, because we'll reach the amount mentioned in point 2 long before we even need to get to these.
The point being not that we have 16 years until the world explodes. The point is that we have only a few decades to fix the problem before enough carbon is in the atmosphere that it's out of our hands entirely. The effects of what we do in the next few decades will entirely dictate the course of the planet's climate for the foreseeable future.
Basically, we'll be fine, but our grandchildren are going to hate us.
If anything is alarmist, it's not the article, it's my stupid joking last paragraph in the first post, and the few sentences I used to lead into the article, both of which were flagrantly wrong and alarmist. So I will remove them.
