Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

If someone ponied up a real plan with timing and costs and how it would impact climate change with some specifics, I'd view that as "real".

My own version would start with some mechanism for closing all our coal power plants, how much that would cost and who pays for it, and how much CO2 that would eliminate and the impact on CC according to the models.

It would not paint a rosey picture, which is why no one does it.

Lake Michigan (Huron) is at an all-time high, which is being blamed on climate change.


In 2013, when Lake Michigan (Huron) were all-time lows, it was blamed on global warming.


I see what they did there.

If someone ponied up a real plan with timing and costs and how it would impact climate change with some specifics, I'd view that as "real".

My own version would start with some mechanism for closing all our coal power plants, how much that would cost and who pays for it, and how much CO2 that would eliminate and the impact on CC according to the models.

It would not paint a rosey picture, which is why no one does it.

Agree on this.  And I'd like to see a similar real plan for carbon emissions from fuel combustion, with costs and timelines for reducing by say 50%, and also by 100%, detailing the expected improvement to environmental issues (based on whatever our "best" models currently are) and what the financial impact would be to those forced to reduce/eliminate their emissions.  Tie that back to the pie chart from the previous page, clearly the USA and China are the big offenders, so that's a good place to start.

Like you say, and like you have said many times, nobody wants to do this because it's pretty ugly.

In regulated states (ie. Southern and Western states except TX and CA) it's utilities (rate-based through their customers) that primarily pay for generation infrastructure.

In states with wholesale generation markets (Northeast, Midwest, CA, TX), companies choose to invest in new generation. In some cases, those are utilities, but in others they are independent companies (eg. Invenergy is one of the leading renewable energy developers).

Of course, renewable portfolio standards can come into play, as well, but they're actually increasingly irrelevant as the economics of wind and solar continue to improve.

Incidentally, this news just came out today: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/bloomberg-commits-500m-to-phasing-out-coal-halting-new-gas-plants/556430/ and https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ge-badly-misjudged-the-clean-energy-transition-costing-investors-almost/556420/

It's not hard. It's easy.

Carbon tax. 

Now, a carbon tax is regressive, which will anger the liberals. But so is the payroll tax, and they support that. 

So why not make the carbon tax revenue-neutral with the payroll tax and eliminate the payroll tax. You replace one regressive tax with another, but in the process you discourage the consumption of what you want to discourage [carbon], while you encourage the thing you actually want to increase [jobs]. 

(Explained more eloquently here.)

It's not hard. It's easy.

Carbon tax.

Now, a carbon tax is regressive, which will anger the liberals. But so is the payroll tax, and they support that.

So why not make the carbon tax revenue-neutral with the payroll tax and eliminate the payroll tax. You replace one regressive tax with another, but in the process you discourage the consumption of what you want to discourage [carbon], while you encourage the thing you actually want to increase [jobs].

(Explained more eloquently here.)

I don't necessarily oppose carbon taxes, but they're much more difficult to get passed, at least in the US, whereas they're common in Western Europe (meanwhile, Alberta actually just repealed its own apparently), and the outcomes aren't necessarily any better than incentivizing renewables and energy efficiency, both of which also reduce emissions and are creating more jobs than pretty much any other sector....

the outcomes aren't necessarily any better than incentivizing renewables and energy efficiency, both of which also reduce emissions and are creating more jobs than pretty much any other sector....

BTW, I tend to not like the sort of incentives/subsidies that are easy to game the system.

Europe's cap-and-trade system is an example. If you don't set the caps correctly, you end up with this arbitrage market where some companies are being [unfairly] subsidized by selling their credits while others are being [unfairly] punished and forced to buy credits, in a way that may not actually conform to solving the problem. Even worse, if you set the caps too high, you don't reduce emissions, and if you set them too low, you end up punishing your own captive industries relative to external (US/worldwide) competitors.

Tesla, which [in addition to a sidelong subsidy from federal/state/other nations' BEV subsidies to buyers] gets significant revenue by selling emissions credits to other automakers, is another example. Their great Q4 and terrible Q1 were directly tied to demand being pulled forward based on the federal tax credit being chopped in half. Now going forward in the US they'll--as pioneers of the industry--will be selling their cars at full price while their competitors who haven't met the volume numbers are subsidized by the Feds at $7500/vehicle.

Imagine if we'd tried to do this with tobacco. Let's set different "caps" on nicotine consumption such that cigars, pipes, menthol cigs, "light" cigs, full-strength cigs, vapes, and smokeless (dip/snuff) all have different caps. Let's allow them to price/sell their credits to each other based on the mix of what they're selling/using. Do you think that would have been NEARLY as efficient of a way to reduce overall tobacco usage as just taxing the stuff? 

Price tends to be a remarkable driver of behavior. Setting a price on carbon--from whatever source--will tend the users of the worst-polluting carbon sources to be punished most heavily, effectively driving down usage.