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Implement a carbon tax, and it will happen. The insistence from some that we can just innovate our way out of the climate crisis, when the Industrial Revolution and pursuit of technological expansion for the sake of profit at all costs is what got us into this situation in the first place, is what I find truly “quixotic.” There is no incentive for corporations to improve the climate situation in a meaningful way.
I agree full-heartedly as a dutiful member of Citizens Climate Lobby. However, if we can’t pass this legislation with a Democratic political stack in place, then when?
Look at how ignored political groups have traditionally made their voices heard. Like racial equality movements, unions, or womens' suffrage.
My thinking about carbon taxes is they will just result in political blowback and a lot of the push comes from entities with an interest in the status quo..

Bill gates is right, trying to impoverish people in the developed world would both result in blowback and be a disaster if implemented. I think there is an 80/20 rule with consumption in developed countries. 20% consume 80% of the resources. Getting the 20% to reduce consumption is a won't fix politically. Yet degrowth people think somehow the 80% can reduce their consumption and not go under. Look at the amount of reduction in consumption that triggers a recession, it's 10X less than the shock degrowth people are demanding.

The complicating factor is the upper classes are completely resistant to any sort collective action that benefits lower class people. And they are hellbent to make sure no one ever gets to see a successful example.

Agree 100%. Tax generation of CO2 at the energy level and all else should follow. Then allow companies to get a tax reduction if they offset their output in some well researched and supported method. Tadaa...
A dollar a gallon direct air capture carbon tax would make gasoline net carbon negative.

Clearly, that would lead to mass hysteria and societal collapse.

/s

If you tax generate of CO2 and "all else follows", what "would follow" is that the party that instituted said tax would be voted out and it would be repealed.
I don't see that working globally. It will be near impossible for it not to get distorted by political influence into something that does little to achieve the goals of reducing carbon emissions.

I truly believe our only hope is to innovate our way out of this.

carbon tax is less popular than 4 degree climate change

can't do it in a democracy

Decreasing consumption doesn't necessarily imply a decrease in quality of life. In the West, at least, we generally work too much, have too little social engagement, and spend lots of money and resources on things that don't really improve our lives. Many things that could actually make us happier don't require much consumption, but they're essentially luxury goods because of the modern lifestyle's high demands. I'm thinking of things like relaxing with friends and/or family, volunteering/contributing to your local community, exercising, eating healthily... even getting enough sleep on a regular basis!
>> we generally work too much

I decide if I work too much. You don't get to decide if I work too much.

>> have too little social engagement

I get to decide my level of social engagement. You don't get to decide my level of social engagement.

>> spend lots of money and resources on things that don't really improve our lives

I get to decide how to spend my money. You don't get to decide how to spend my money.

I agree to an extent but a person in North Korea would say they get to decide how brainwashed they are.

Everything's relative. As a nation, the US has abysmal parental leave and vacation policies compared to others. By numerous metrics, we do work too much.

Similarly, the US is the poster child of capitism and we do buy tons of things relative to other nations.

A little aggressive, no? No one's "deciding" anything for anyone in my comment.

You don't get to decide how much work/social engagement/widget purchasing makes you content any more than you can "decide" how many drinks it takes for you to get drunk.

All I'm saying is that many people could both reduce their consumption and improve their quality of lives by optimizing for factors unrelated to material consumption.

Hard agree.

Anyone claiming that "we are X and Y" is just an authoritarian in disguise, trying to dictate how everyone else should live.

At some point they should really ask themselves whether "saving the planet" is actually worth it if everyone is locked up in a cage for the sake of controlling consumation. Might as well just kill us all.

I don't think any of those are mutually exclusive. Choosing or being manipulated into choosing an unhealthy level of social engagement doesn't make it any less unhealthy
I mean you can go to do? People have made their choices (including me).
Most of this is pretty obvious and yet people act differently. That’s the whole point. It’s not a realistic solution.
> Decreasing consumption doesn't necessarily imply a decrease in quality of life

Decreasing consumption in a more simplified way is just decreasing energy use. For 90% of people on earth this would be worse than climate change. It’s never going to happen.

Yeah no duh we don’t have any power, and even if I convinced 100,000 people to walk everywhere and never drive, we would only lower gas prices by a fraction of a cent which would result in other people driving more.
Hey Bill and other elites - does this mean no more 20,000 square foot homes and private jets?
Gates’ main house is actually 66,000 square feet.

He apparently has 6 total houses.

See: https://www.velvetropes.com/backstage/bill-gates-house

Anyways, Gates is always preaching about “policy” (The Gates Foundation is about power and getting governments to fund their objectives, ultimately) but never actually sets a good individual example of how to live, like normal citizens.

I mean, it is not coincidental that he is preaching about global warming right after the Nord Stream pipeline was blown, which released an unprecedented amount of methane in to the atmosphere.

I always feel the talks of private jets are missing the point. (Besides, it's always the private jets of Al Gore and Bill Gates that are in question. People never ask about the private jets of BP execs.)

To simplify, let's assume that Bill Gates has a Boeing 747, which burns about 38 pounds of fuel per mile [1]. Distance between New York (JFK) and London (LHR) is 3,440 mile. For a round trip, double that, so we have about 261k pounds, or 118 ton of fuel. Applying jet fuel to CO2 conversion ratio of 3.16 [2], we get about 374 ton of CO2.

If Bill Gates takes this trip every day for a year, we get about 137,000 tons of CO2. Okay, that's a lot! However,

Mankind emitted about 35 billion ton of CO2 in 2020. That's about 66,000 tons per minute. So Bill Gates would have contributed about two minute's worth of global warming in a year.

That's still an extremely large amount for a single person, but the question we should ask is, did Bill Gates's action (such as advocating nuclear power) result in delaying global warming by two minutes? Not one year, not even a day, but just two minutes?

Alternatively, did he speed up mankind's preparation, again, by two minutes?

If the answer to either question is Yes, then I'd argue that it's worth the CO2 spent on it.

Now let's invert the question. What's the justification for people who say "Fuck global warming!" and hop on a trip to Hawaii? Collectively they sustain many more flights per year, and it's not like most of them are doing anything substantial to mitigate AGW.

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

[2] https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-the-growth-in-gr...

I deeply believe in leading by example. Anyone demanding others change should be fully committed to those actions and demonstrate them in all aspects of their life. Anything else is absolutely purely hypocritical and person doesn't deserve to be heard and should be mocked out from any polite and non-polite conversation.
>Besides, it's always the private jets of Al Gore and Bill Gates that are in question. People never ask about the private jets of BP execs.

Because the BP execs aren't being hypocrites and telling all the commoners to lower their living standards..

Bill Gates is one of a small group of people I feel should be taking private jets. He and his wife are the world's biggest philanthropists and they do much more good for the world quickly meeting the necessary people to effect change than wasting hours at the airport.

For the vast majority of other ultra rich, they should be suffering through awful airports and airlines like everyone else. Partly just so there's a chance their collective frustration of flying actually results in somehow working to improve the broken industry.

> You’ll never solve climate change by asking people to consume less

The headline says 'no.'

I believe Bill Gates home is actually around 66,000 square feet.
Bill Gates in his climate book: “geoengineering is the only known way that we could hope to lower the earth’s temperature within years or even decades without crippling the economy.”

Pretty soon we’re going to start seeing authoritarian solutions to climate change. Rich and powerful people aren’t just going to sit around and watch the planet die. I think they’ll do whatever it takes no matter how many people are hurt.

100% bullshit and such a typically American way of looking at it (I am an American). Look how fast the world changed when Covid hit. Achieve a change in values and the whole world will turn on its axis.
During covid, climate wasn't issue. People, like Gates, promotes mask, vaccines, antibacterial gels, tests... Which produces millions of tons of plastic waste. And also great income for his business. But who cares, now we need innovations because he loves our planet a people, right?
I see many comments here, in various media, and hear in real world conversations blaming corporations and billionaires. They're not faultless but we should be way more critical of ourselves as average citizens.

Every year we want bigger and bigger cars, particularly in the West, but it's a global long term trend. If you compare pretty much any 2022 vs 2002 model vehicle, say the Honda Accord, you're going to be shocked by the increase in physical dimensions.

How is that not incredibly hypocritical to want ever larger cars (mostly SUVs and trucks now) and yet point fingers at the companies we work for for their poor ESG funding and goals? We aren't even willing to accept cars that remain the same dimensions. They literally have to be bigger. That's despite average family sizes gradually declining for many decades. Climate change matters.. but not enough to give up the chance for a larger car next time.

Bigger vehicles means more materials (plastics, metals, etc), weight that could have been shaved, worse fuel/battery efficiency, and it wouldn't surprise me if it requires signifantly more asphalt and road repairs over time to accommodate the vehicles.

I could keep going about how obsessed we are with more and more horsepower and with lower 0-60 mph times, all of which are extremely excessive wants in the face of climate change.

Bill calls for greater innovation, but as soon as we get more efficient things, we just consume more.

We have constantly gotten better and better tech, and yet our consumption of resources only goes up. It seems that resource usage has nothing to do with how efficient or advanced our tech is, but simply the maximum amount of human labor we can allocate to resource extracting.

So climate change can only really be solved by a lower population.

It is pure consumerism. You can add smartphones, clothes... Many things that we don't actually need to buy every year but yet, companies produce more and more for higher profit.

Blaming billionaires and corporations from brand new iPhone on networks made by big-tech sounds ironical indeed.

Localize manufacturing? With those huge cargo ships producing lots of CO2, wouldn't the best impact be to reduce the use of those ships? Try not to ship parts to get assembled into another part, to get shipped again and again back to the origin, and then final assembly and packaging and shipped to the store?

I know it's naive to think we can build manufacturing plants at the source of raw materials, and near consumers, but there should be a better balance?

> to think we can build manufacturing plants at the source of raw materials, and near consumers

The source of raw materials and consumers may be quite far apart (certainly in the modern world). While it can be argued that maybe they shouldn't be, that is likely to require a significant change in consumer (human?) behavior. And then there is the question of how local is "local" - are you advocating for each city/state to be self-sufficient in terms of agriculture and manufacturing or are you considering a whole massive country like the US as "local".

I think people are quite open to many practices that involve reduced consumption, they just don't like the vague idea of reducing consumption because it suggests austerity.
Completely agree. Science has to save us here, as it will govern enough time and stability. We need an age of sustainable abundance, not sustainability through frugality.
Asking? Of course not. There's no incentive to just stop, and 100x more signals to consume.

Instead, apply of concept of capital gains being taxed less than income to consumption and carbon footprint. It works for the behavior of the rich. I'm sure Bill would agree. It can work for the rest of us in the context of climate change.

p.s. Funny how Bill (and then wife) built a massively excessive home. I guess he asked himself and that didn't work. So now he speaks from experience?

I think these mega billionaires do that as a way to park their money, financial advisors telling them to diversify into real estate lol. Just wish they'd do it in a more socially productive way...
I agree 100% with Bill.

You need to incentivize more efficient consumption. Whether through technological advances or through policy that “nudges” people to consume more efficiently (e.g. carbon taxes).

But the challenges remains. Severs governments were cutting taxes and handing out cash when gas prices jumped. That’s the exact opposite of what you want to do.

So consuming less will be actually effective but it's just that people won't listen/change. I agree with him
I agree with this. We may end up having to filter the carbon out using nuclear energy.
Unsurprising that one of the world's most successful capitalists is advocating for innovation to drive consumerism rather than anti-consumerism.

I'm not saying he's wrong; it's hard to get people to reflect on, and change, their lifestyles.

But it sends a harmful message; it's like saying it's pointless to teach people to swim safely, because staffing better lifeguards would be more likely than changing peoples' behaviour. Then people count on other people to bail them out from their poor decisions and end up drowning (an actually possible scenario with rising sea levels)