How to make decarbonizing sexy?

[andygates]

In discussion today, "why does everyone have to agree before cutting emissions? Why not just do it?"

As I see it, this is because they all view "it" as a painful thing, and so the whole Prisoner's Dilemma / competition thing kicks in. Untrustworthy actors are expected to welch; trustworthy actors don't want to be the schmuck.

The whole thing would be a metric ton easier if someone had the chutzpah to present decarbonizing as a short term economic and social good.

Any suggestions? despaer , economics is your bag. How'd you sell it? The current best sell, the Stern report, is about a 500% ROI but on a century timescale, which clearly means not you, not me and not the current governments (possibly not the current nations).

Comments

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Strictly by the numbers, 500% ROI over 100 years isn't an impressive rate at all. You can make that much by putting your money in Premium Bonds.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Which is why hotter sexier stuff is needed! Scrappage (Cash for Clunkers) is one that works well - the gov doesn't lose money, because it takes in sales tax on the sales that would otherwise be lost, and the net is dirty vehicles off the road and cleaner ones on it.

There's a new programme for boilers which is really really hard to get excited about, but trading my 1988 immersion for an on-demand heater might be attractive with it. Without it, I don't have the spare cash.

These schemes score the carbon benefit by providing short-term financial incentives.

But they're drips and drops. The big infrastructure changes are going to need some clever financial instruments to make them sexy to the infrastructure organisations. The alternative is just for the state to fund or mandate it, and that's the sulky pain that is being assumed, and that's why the resistance.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

I agree, but things like the boiler subsidy really are just ways for the government to rig the scales of our decisionmaking with a weighty pile of taxpayer cash. I kind of think that is the way it has to be.

Apart from in the land of transport, perhaps, where making public transport work would be a net boon to us all and worth the money even without the energetic implications.

Oh - and I have another one for you - the reason houses are all crappy in this country is that nobody builds their own house. In much of Europe, people build their own houses, and so there is a thriving market in the tech to make houses which are efficient. And the reason nobody builds their own house in the UK is that planning law makes it pretty much impossible to to find a place to build one, and impossible to make it unusual if you do find a place to build one.

A wholesale revision of planning law would (a) be good for the energetics and (b) make our houses better. Also (c) ruin the ugly business models of the big housebuilders, who profit the most from the current planning regime.

[skean.livejournal.com]

Permits. Your only allowed to breed if you are carbon neutral over your whole life, measured from birth to birth of your child. Babies start racking up a carbon debt the minute they are born, to be paid off before they can breed (like a student loan).

[andygates.livejournal.com]

I fear that this will not pass muster. Especially the bit with the implanted contraceptive only de-activatable by the RFIDs controlled by the One World Government...

[simoneck.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's how.

[simoneck.livejournal.com]

Hummm, and how do you control whether people breed or not?
I can't see any government trying to get that one through in a democracy.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Well, that might be an argument against democracy, but that's tricky to get support for!

Prosperity governs breeding rates. The more prosperous, healthy and long-lived people are, the less they breed. So to control population, just make everything wonderful and folks will slow down their breeding automagically (well, in a generation or two).

So: How do we make everything wonderful?

[andygates.livejournal.com]

I'm going to rule out population control on grounds that it goes against a fundamental tendency of all life: the tendency to increase. Check the first couple of chapters of Uncle Chuck's opus for details.

[despaer.livejournal.com]

I still like my idea of spending some billions paying to put solar panels on every roof you can. Lets say 10 million properties * £3000 average government contribution (the real cost is about double that so ask people to chip in, its their bills that will shrink) = £30Bn. Lots of money, but (a) you spend it over 5-10 years so the immediate cost isn't that great, (b) half of it comes back in tax as you insist on the use of British manufacturing which has, lets be honest, plenty of spare capacity right now and (c) we just gave about that much to RBS in one swift hit, recession or not.

The numbers are approximate but the order of magnitude is sound. These panels, by the way, are not the heat your house sort, they are the generate juice and feed it into the grid if possible sort.

Everyone would like it except those living in flats who weren't eligible because they didn't have a roof. That's unfortunate for them but not a good enough reason not to do it.

And then we could enter the world of hydrogen powered cars, solar panels and fuel tanks in your garage. I have no idea whether this would be viable or whether you would end up with enough hydrogen every day to make it to the end of your drive but it would be a nice thought.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

It's certainly the kind of Big Project I'm thinking of. You'd need to roll out sell-back junction boxes (they're commonplace in greenie-land now, Good Energy do 'em as an option but I have no roof nor open land). The Grid may need infrastructural work too, dunno how that would go.

Here's a back-of-envelope calculation that suggests that if your scheme went ahead, it would score 100% of daytime summer needs, 20% in winter.

http://lightbucket.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/a-second-look-at-solar-power-on-roofspace/

[despaer.livejournal.com]

Whether or not this is right the principle remains. In order to get the common person to behave more greenly (is that a word? It is now.), it is necessary to take an economic lever to them. The problem is that most governments spend their time making that lever into a stick to hit you with (think fuel duty, flight taxes etc) and then throw a sop in the form of a few million quid to replace boilers with.

Not surprisingly, people see that as using the green label as an excuse to raise taxes and they don't see the tax getting hypothecated for environmental, and specifically carbon reduction purposes. As well as needing more carrot like the scheme above, we also need more honesty. If the current Copenhagen lot could agree to be honest about their green taxes and agree that they were not allowed to imply a tax was for the good of the environment unless they spent that money on carbon reduction projects then that would beat any CO2 emission target they set as that would represent a behaviour change rather than an unenforceable target.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Aye but hypothecation's one of those things that sounds great but can be a bugger to implement. I'm beeped daily by drivers who think their VED is hypothecated to the roads and I'm sponging when I bike -- utterly bogus in all respects. And if you're talking about a major restructure of, say, the electricity grid to support lots of town-scale generation projects then that's just too big. There's got to be flexibility; roughly balance, yes, but don't make hypothecation a fetish.

The tax-as-a-stick approach is pure Left behaviour modification. It makes people grumble but it also works - look at smoking.

What would the Right do to achieve the same thing? Would they have to accept that the enviroment was a common good, and not an externality? How on earth would you quantify that? Stern?

[despaer.livejournal.com]

Your points are valid, you can't truly hypothecate.

The problem is at the moment the difference between what people are forced to pay 'cos its environmental and what actually gets spent on carbon reduction stuff is so large that nobody believes taxes are implemented to try and modify behaviour and are therefore much more likely to protest them and, as governments of the west need to be regularly elected, this reduces their ability to modify behaviour by this means. Eventually, people also simply start to sidestep the tax because they think it is unjust. Again, look at smoking and the smuggling of cigarettes.