Item — HN Reader

> subsidizing fossil fuels to 7 trillion a year globally

This is misleading. See https://www.slowboring.com/i/145942190/the-case-of-the-myste...

> The vast majority of the “subsidies” are “implicit subsidies,” which include “undercharging for environmental costs.” In other words, they are characterizing governments’ failure to impose a carbon tax as a “subsidy” for fossil fuel use.

2 comments

If I have to pay to clean up your mess to live in a world the way it was before you polluted it, it’s a subsidy

Before fossil fuels our cities were ankle-deep in horse shit, and when a horse died the owner dumped the carcass in the river. Some level of pollution is in inescapable price of civilization. We shouldn't be reckless or wanton about it but it's unreasonable and uneconomic to ever clean up all of the mess.

All or nothing fallacy. The argument is not to eliminate pollution, the argument is to stop generating greenhouse gases. You can already see the effects of climate change and it's guaranteed to get worse.

I don't understand why you're making excuses for carbon pollution.

But you don’t know the cleanup cost yet, so how can you put a dollar amount on the subsidy?

There are estimates for the social cost of carbon. It isn't super exact.

Not paying for pollution we know they cause is an implicit subsidy, feels quite obvious.

Then the same "implicit subsidy" goes for literally every facet of human activity. Do builders of wind turbines and solar farms also pay commensurately for the pollution in the manufacturing and development process?

Everything is implicitly subsidized because every action that any living being takes affects some other living being and the ecosystem as a whole, because we all live on the same planet. It's a meaningless statement.

> Do builders of wind turbines and solar farms also pay commensurately for the pollution in the manufacturing and development process?

Sure, we can assign those costs to builders, why not? There's already lots of discussion about the true cost of EV batteries and how they're subsidized.

> Everything is implicitly subsidized because every action that any living being takes affects some other living being and the ecosystem as a whole, because we all live on the same planet.

Actions don't all have the same effect so I think it's totally fair to consider their true costs.

I think where it gets a little tricky is how you decide to assign costs to people that have children or are children. But that's really getting in the weeds.

> Then the same "implicit subsidy" goes for literally every facet of human activity

No, we generally pay for pollution. If I litter I pay. If I have to throw stuff away I pay (via taxes). If I have to dump dangerous chemicals I pay.

Oil industry can dump whatever they want into the air and they don't pay. You, and I, pay. We don't actually know how profitable oil is because of this.

Don't forget that the oil industry requires a lot of manufacturing and development too. They also cause stuff on top of that.

What an exercise in false equivalence. Does every facet of human activity have the same impact as CO2 emission from fossil fuel combustion?

Why focus on CO2 emissions? That's only one aspect of pollution.

Because of its enormous global impact.

Ok, where should we focus it then?