Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet (opens in new tab)

Who has the power to outlaw carbon globally? Those with energy have the power, and currently carbon is where our energy is. I don't see a ban working.

Further, our whole systemis dependent on carbon. Millions (billions?) would starve without it, along with other downsides.

Future impacts will be worse if we don't stop, but tell that to people suffering today.

The advantage of a carbon tax approach is that it uses market incentives to encourage investments in alternatives. Hopefully, we are able to discover viable alternatives via this method, otherwise we're done for either way.

A command and control shutdown simply seems impossible. Maybe carbon taxes are too, but I feel a tax and dividend approach could work, as everyone gets money from it. Or a proposal to tax carbon and massively cut income taxes.

The yellow jacket protests you cite:

1. Didn't have any return of money to taxpayers. It was just a tax hike.

2. Would be even worse if fuel were banned

What?

That doesn't make sense.

Not all countries need to do it. Just most.

In in actual fact, the sooner leader countries like the USA do it the sooner other countries get their act together.

Don't act like this is all or nothing. It's not.

Furthermore, the sooner the USA does it the sooner technologies improve, the sooner other smaller countries are suddenly enabled by said technologies.

That aside whole "we all need to do it" is utter nonsense. No, you don't. Other countries taking advantage of you is still not a socially moral excuse. Mind yourself first thanks.

There's no single solution and there will always be a reason not to do something.

Border adjustments are a well understood policy solution to this issue. Imports from polluting countries are taxed appropriately, and exports to those countries subsidized. From the perspective of anyone inside the nation with the border adjustment, it’s as though the whole world implemented the carbon tax.

15% is massive. We're discussing the same tax in my country and we're like 0.01%.

> The biggest problem with such a tax is that all countries would have to implement it. When the US is accounting for about 15% of global carbon emissions

Hypothetically provinces/countries could be taxed relative to their emissions (albeit this would take some fantasy-like widely agreed upon criteria).

The US has a little over 4% of the world population, yet it's responsible for 15% of carbon emissions [1]. Even if the US is the only country to implement it, it would already make a huge difference.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

Trade sanctions are the usual mechanism to influence other governments. I don’t see why this situation would be any different.

Where are you getting your statistics from?

According to a quick Google search, https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/sc..., China is the highest emitter, followed by the US, which emits half as much CO2, and India emits half again as much as the US.

Ok, so how about implementing the tax only to the extent required to get per capita emissions down to the global mean?

True, but leading by example would be a good start.

This is downvoted but is actually a good take.

A failure mode of environmentalism is attaching it to random other progressive ideas. "Let's have a carbon tax and use it to fund universal healthcare!" I want a carbon tax, and I want universal healthcare, AND I want them to be completely disjoint. I will argue for each independently on their merits.

Otherwise both magnify each others' vulnerabilities. For example, say universal health care is funded through a carbon tax, and this tax works really well and emissions plummet. Now universal health care suffers? What a stupid outcome!

Robust government programs are independent with separate funding (see Social Security). Make a big carbon tax, have it fund an equally big carbon dividend, and run it independently from everything else on the progressive or conservative wish list.

This cuts the other way too. No, a carbon tax should not fund conservative pet projects like eliminating capital gains. That has to live or die on its own merits, not tied to environmentalism. The carbon tax must be its own thing to endure.

The tax should be used for undoing the destruction caused to the environment.

Governments to determine policy goals, design efficient markets.

Taxes to discourage undesirable behavior.

Investments to encourage desired behavior, outcomes.

Regulation to ensure markets are fair, safe, competitive.

They're just tools. Why all the fuss?

Why do people keep arguing about the tools? eg "Taxes are theft!"

Is it because some don't want to argue about the policy?

The point of a carbon tax is to fund and/or incentivize research into non-carbon energy production, or carbon removal technology. If you just offset other taxes, for a tax-neutral result, then there's no (macro) tax incentive so how does that happen?

I don't know why you are being downvoted. We are seeing gasoline tax money moving to other budgets (not env, not energy) in my country.

No. The point is not the revenue, the point is to eliminate the market distorting externalities. If anything, this is actually a free market solution.

Why is this being downvoted? It’s factually accurate.

> This only helps if you can fully audit carbon released from burning rainforests

Murder laws aren’t rendered useless by unsolved murders. A carbon tax makes sense even if only large-scale domestic production is initially covered.

Would you give up more to ensure your children don’t grow up in a dystopian nightmare? What if the necessary amount is 60% of your income? 90%? What if our only hope is to go back to a 18C standard of living? Unfortunately the planet doesn’t care if you have enough cash to pay rent once you account for your environmental externalities.

We are all on the same planet and we'll all suffer as temperatures rise.

Let's agree that a carbon tax should be revenue neutral (via a dividend), and not fund either a progressive or conservative agenda. The purpose of the tax is to internalize CO2 externalities. Other issues can be hashed out on their merits.

You avoid paying more by buying products and services that emit less carbon and therefore are less taxed. This economic incentive is how the tax helps curb carbon emissions (and hopefully other forms of pollution also, why stop at carbon when the world is drowning in single-use plastic for example).

Hence the dividend part. You fair share of the tax should be returned to you.

Meh, I'd rather keep ours in the ground and be the last to run out. Maybe that's a selfish and defeatist mindset, but it's another way to look at things besides just "lets not ruin our own environment".

I would say Obama's EPA standards on cars had a bigger impact than what you described, with the added benefit of being a move in efficiency and not just burning through reserves.

Could you elaborate? As far as I understand it, the primary drivers by far were technological advancements in fracking and horizontal drilling. These technologies initially led to the gas boom and then later leveraged for oil.

Except for the irreparable environmental impact of it all...

"Credit where credit is due"

How many people die of cancer in the US due to massive pollution brought on by "policies"? 10k, 100k, 1M?

And how long will it take the US courts to find the CO2 producers guilty, same as they did with tobacco?

All big oil producers are on ultra shaky ground due to future settlements and fines.

The US has other more conventional levers of international power to wield. Taking oil off the table is a win for the US.

Re: externalities

Check out what fracking has done to Pennsylvania's formerly wild forests compared to New York; there is a hideously ugly network of access roads and cut clearings for fracking wells .

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9889724,-78.7814974,8036m/da...

My friend pointed this out to me and I was truly disgusted...

There's no understanding it because it doesn't actually make sense. Lasting solutions to earth-scale issues like climate change must ultimately be social solutions (regulations, taxes, treaties, and ultimately alignment of incentives). Terraforming Mars seems easier than developing social solutions to some people, so that's what they fixate on. But trying to spread into the solar system because we're afraid of having the hard conversations about social solutions is a gross misapplication of imagination and resources.

Sure. It will just be like living in a parking lot with some potted plants, instead of living in a forest. We won’t die, just most of the biodiversity.

Well maybe a billion or two of us will die. Probably not us.

I hope you are right. I'd still rather live some place else in the solar system. This place is getting kind of crowded for my taste.

It's not. The first Blade Runner was set in 2019, where LA had a population of 106 million (from the original voice over by Harrison Ford). That was the 80s apocalyptic view of our time as an overcrowded and polluted hell where people have to crowd into massive cities for survival.

If you lived during the 80s, you'll recall predictions of the Amazon being cut down and the ozone layer being depleted by now. Also peak oil was supposed to have happened, along with several other resources becoming rare.

2049 was a continuation of that alternative future, which had flying cars, off-world colonies and strong AI in the form of synthetic, fleshy humans. IOW, nothing like the actual future, to date.

This is true: oils that have undergone full hydrogenation become saturated fats, because the carbon double bonds break and bond and with excess hydrogen until the fatty acid is fully saturated. The cis/trans distinction affects the double bonds, which no longer exist once the molecule is saturated.

On the other hand, advocacy about the likely adverse health effects of saturated fats has been commonplace for a lot longer than the awareness of trans fats. This, together with likely consumer confusion about terms like "partially hydrogenated" vs. [fully] "hydrogenated", and the unwieldiness of using a solid-at-room-temp fat in a blend all add up to reasons why it's probably easier to use palm oil.

So far, coconut oil and palm oil have largely managed to avoid being caught up in the conversation about saturated fats. Marketing and market positioning undoubtedly plays a key role. The other is nutrition as a field of study and a topic of conversation: rigor is hard to achieve, conflict of interest is everywhere, advice is a mix of unhelpful and conflicting, and pop publications do even more disservice by repeating soundbites without caveats and context. In a few years, the next 'awakening' -- helped by the awful environmental and social justice of tropical oils -- will probably purge coconut oil and palm oil from manufactured foods in some countries, and we'll migrate to some other inconvenient tradeoff whose true consequences will become widely known only much much later, all the while the public is pleased that they precipitated positive change.

I think you are misunderstanding (or I am)

And where do you think oil coconuts are grown?

I don't remember reading any articles about palm oil being used as biodiesel in US media. Most of the coverage centered around palm oil being the savior from trans-fats.

Buy stuff with no, or with good palm oil in it. It’s not that hard, not much more expensive, and more pleasant than a heart attack.

Is that really the only other option?