Well properly fixing the current issues would require removing a hundred years of CO2.

Except the two are not mutually exclusive, and TFA points out that tax and price incentives tend to be successful. I would take anything from Pielke with a grain of salt. As much as he loves to pay lip service to supporting the most minor climate policies, he notoriously downplays the effects of climate change. But that's just par for the course to be on the AEI payroll, I suppose.

I have a theory called "marginal cost pricing" that will blow his mind.

If we sit on our thumbs and do nothing about it perhaps (the uncertainty bars around long term damage are massive though). But changing CO2 levels is not the only way to avert that damage.

It’s very hard to prove conclusively that any measures would actually help the situation.

If anything shows the great failure of the church of economics, it's this attitude. "Everything has a monetary value".

Here's a clue to those in denial: economics can only value things in the past and the present, and only in approximation, and only in human terms of immediate utility.

Because economics CANNOT properly value virtually anything that has not yet occurred. Accounting systems may exist for it and of course they are the favorite of the cooked book. The faith that the free market is some vastly hyperintelligent entity that exceeds the power of human cognition.

Of course human perception of reality is fundamentally flawed, even for those with heavy scientific training in the compromises our senses and psychology make to perceive the world. And yet economics treats the flawed everyday idiot as some ultrapowerful computational unit of valuation of reality. Of course, that is dogma.

What is the economic value of a recently extinct species? What is the economic value of a non-acidic ocean? What is the economic value of the continued operation of oxygen-producing microorganisms in the ocean?

What is the value of the human race if it goes extinct?

The core of the problem is the function of money and monetary value: it has an essential component of whitewashing virtually all environmental impacts and damage, as well as human misery, inflicted in the generation of the "currency number". Once the "currency number" has been "earned", the sociopathy involved in the generation is blessed by the church of economics as a completely forgiven sin: because the money is the only point, a tautological pursuit.

What oil executive, car executive, politician, industrialist, coal mining executive will every face the music for their environmental sins? Because they have been immediately pardoned from the confessional booth of the limited liability corporation.

One of my prayers for cryptocurrency was a way of creating a currency that could somehow devalue these fortunes of destruction once their true macabre consequences became apparent, but it would just be another farm of energy-sucking servers, and lets face it, the damage is mostly done at this point.

So, rant aside, it doesn't FUCKING MATTER WHAT THE DOLLAR FIGURE IS IF WE GO EXTINCT. Dollars don't exist without humans, and humans don't exist without a functional biosphere. The cost is Infinite Floating Point Overflow. It is NaN.

Also the main detractors have a reputation for not believing things that can be proven in general.

Yes that helps but more important was the fracking revolution that replaced a lot of coal with gas.

Probably the easiest way would have been to draw a line around each factory in the US, declare that those now counted as outside-US for emissions purposes, and then declare that now the US was a zero-emissions country.

Done and dusted, problem solved.

Our modern lights, screens and appliances all use less energy than 30 years ago.

Really?

Not a huge expert but this is a huge talking point on the right. They don't like the carbon tax. E.g. second result from a simple search: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/carbon-tax-political-popula...

Yes, Liberals (such as me) like carbon taxes. But even among liberals taxes aren't a popular subject. Especially not a potentially regressive tax like some carbon taxes.

Right. It's not about 1 storm in isolation. Climate change is evident through the very clear and measurable patterns of weather over time, not to mention glacial loss, ocean acidity, etc.

Why is this downvoted? I dont understand what is controversial here.

Sure, but after so long of seeing +5c it's getting a little unnerving, plus, it's just hot all the time, I love cooler weather and wearing jeans when working outdoors etc, usually by now it's very cool, but We just can seem to get to that point yet.

...or I might be living in a place experience an extreme heatwave induced by anthropogenic warming ?

"Melting Glaciers force Switzerland and Italy to Redraw Borders"

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/sep/29/melting-...

Record high temps are almost 75% of new temperature records. The ~25% that are new lows ate due to arctic cold slipping down with our more wobbly jet stream. And the ice melt has hidden almost 90% of the net heat increase. Ice melting the last degree consumes much more heat than going warmer. This is all happening much faster than any time in our geologic record. We are at serious danger of runaway warming.

You're reading the wrong sources. The actual science is clear, the earth is undergoing rapid climate change due to human-driven CO2 release.

No need to rephrase! You can simply continue moving your eyes left to right to find additional words!

Yes, exactly. People won’t trade their QoL today for a better future for the planet. At some point that will have to be done by force rather than choice. So yes, you’d better hope the magic policy that both A) Works and B) improves QOL today is found.

Although to be honest, this point won’t come until everyone alive today is probably long dead so it doesn’t matter that much.

I was contemplating tossing in a “If the policies you followed have brought you to this, of what use were the policies?” but it’s more than likely that these policies were designed to fail and were a distraction. Climate change to TPTB is a situational comedy.

Public failed policies prevent or deter future failed policies. You must hope for failed policies to get to NaN% policies.