I'm surprised to see the comments here are overwhelmingly positive. Usually I feel like the hacker community tends to have a somewhat libertarian bent in a lot of ways, but I guess not here? I don't particularly understand why the government needs to step in and do this. If we've reached the peak oil inflection point by that time as some of the commenters here have speculated, would that not force essentially the same action anyways by driving the price of gas sky high? Additionally, it would provide a gigantic monetary incentive for whichever companies want to pursue alternative fuel sources. To me this seems to be something that will be sorted out by the market in time, rather than forced at the barrel of a government gun.
> To me this seems to be something that will be sorted out by the market in time, rather than forced at the barrel of a government gun.
The purpose of this type of legislation is to save the planet Earth from our polluting ways. What if peak oil never happens for some reason? Are you just going to sit there and let rich people pump out poisonous gasses?! For hundreds of years?
No! Let's say that again. NO! Even the most intense libertarians must realize that if there is zero financial incentive to help out the Earth, perhaps government intervention is a very smart way of going.
If we know that we're changing our atmosphere so quickly and so negatively (for us and our fellow animals, anyway) and it's cheaper to keep doing it, you already know humans will keep doing it unless it becomes illegal.
I think you are using the wrong vocabulary for libertarians.
This legislation is more about climate change than about peak oil. It is possible that peak oil hits just when we also want to limit our CO2 emissions but the two are unrelated. (Some non-libertarians would probably add that peak oil is also a good reason for legislation, they will say that without it the transition will be very rough, too rough to be handled only by the market. But that’s only non-libertarians.)
There are no incentives for individuals or companies to change their behavior because of climate change. It’s a good old tragedy of the commons. The incentives have to be created outside of the market and a typical way to do that is through legislation.
Here are the three assumptions that might lead even a libertarian to support such legislation:
1. Climate change is an example of the tragedy of the commons and doesn’t create (enough) incentives for individuals or companies to change their behavior.
2. It is possible to create such incentives through legislation and the proposed legislation is a good way to do that.
3. The costs of climate change are lower than the costs of preventing or slowing down climate change.
Those are also the three assumptions (and there might be more but I think the list is pretty complete) you have to argue against if you do not support this legislation.
Libertarianism is about liberty, not about optimising statistics like "the cost of climate change" (whatever that's supposed to mean).
The climate will change. That's completely natural and I can't see a reason to stop it (honestly I think it's impossible). Humans and other animals will just adapt and the evolution will continue.
> The climate will change. That's completely natural and I can't see a reason to stop it (honestly I think it's impossible). Humans and other animals will just adapt and the evolution will continue.
This is a very weird paragraph. Forgive me if I don't understand properly, but let's look at this carefully:
> The climate will change. That's completely natural
The climate does change naturally. It also changes due to artificial reasons (unless you consider human pollution to be natural, but that's just word semantics. For now, lets call human-caused climate change "artificial").
So no this is not completely natural. Our activities have had intense repercussions on our planet's climate in a very artificial way.
> and I can't see a reason to stop it
Really? You can't see any reason at all? If we don't stop polluting and heating up the planet, it's possible that hundreds of millions of people will suffer and perhaps die. Worst case scenarios have terrible food shortages and awful fresh water problems as rain patterns shift and change. Even if none of this happens there is absolutely that risk. How can you say that you see no reason to stop the human-caused climate change?
> (honestly I think it's impossible).
This makes zero sense to me. We started changing our climate a long time ago and didn't even notice. We're still changing it now. What makes you think it's "impossible" to start going the other way? Dude, we can drive electric cars on the moon. We can develop technologies to help regulate our climate here on Earth just fine.
> Humans and other animals will just adapt and the evolution will continue.
Not so fast. While evolution will definitely continue, there already are mass extinctions happening due to climate change. We're changing things far faster than most species can react to, far faster than evolution can handle.
Life on Earth will most certainly continue and evolve for many millions of years into the future. But at what cost? We don't need to kill off millions of species just 'cause it's cheaper to burn fuel than use other methods.
Let's try to keep as many currently-alive species going as long as we can, yeah? What's the harm in that?
Your reaction to the risks you've mentioned looks like panic. Maximal possible damage doesn't matter. A meteorite hitting the Earth would definitely cause enormous damage but is very unlikely to happen. What matters is the expected value of the damage. What are the numbers in the case of climate change?
I really don't think that trying to preserve as many species as possible is a rational goal. It causes economical harm for example. What's wrong with extinctions?
I often hear about the costs of climate change. What I don't hear about is:
1. possible benefits; what we should assess is benefits - costs, not costs alone,
2. possible benefits and costs of so called solutions. For example introducing electric cars will increase demand for batteries and electricity. That means increased demand for coal, gas or nuclear power. What will be the effects of these?
I'm just very skeptical about models of so complex systems. My skepticism is increased by the involvement of politics and the hype around the topic.
We eat a lot of animals. If you mess with this complex system in weird ways like changing the climate, it seems possible that some of the animals we eat will lose their happy place in the food chain.
That's a reason to care and a reason to try and not dramatically and immediately shift the Earth's climate.
> 1. possible benefits
Some places will get more rain. They might like that. The rest of us might get a lot less rain...that would suck. Right now, people live where it rains. If it starts raining in different places...well, that's going to cause trouble.
(The rain is an example. There are obviously other examples.)
> 2. possible benefits and costs of so called solutions. For example introducing electric cars will increase demand for batteries and electricity. That means increased demand for coal, gas or nuclear power. What will be the effects of these?
Long term, this is far far better. Even if these electric cars are powered by dirty coal. The amount of electricity used to power an electric car pollutes far, far less than a gas car per miles driven.
But ideally we'd move towards wind, solar, nuclear, etc to make these options even better.
If you are scared or upset at the future using solar energy and you don't know what the effects are, will you at least agree that it's likely a much better move than burning things?
Your skepticism could be healthy, but I think you are too skeptical and that is damaging your ability to rationally think about our fragile Earth.
I don’t think that libertarianism is a suicide pact. Sure, if the costs of climate change are minimal many libertarians won’t accept legislation limiting their freedom but I’m pretty sure that position changes as soon as a somewhat large amount of loss of life is predicted.
Your second paragraph challenges assumption three: “The costs of climate change are lower than the costs of preventing or slowing down climate change.” It’s consequently no wonder that you disagree with the policy – pretty much anyone who disagrees with assumption three can be expected to be against this legislation, independent of her or his other political views.
You are basically saying that the costs of slowing or stopping climate change will be infinite (it will be impossible) or at least extremely high, at any rate higher than the costs of climate change itself.
The extraction of oil is quite damaging to the environment. The use of oil causes damage to the environment. Oil is the cause of some wars, corruption, and extensive environmental damage in some countries. There is no inherent right to use oil. There is no inherent right to do as we please to the environment. At least, not in many peoples' perception.
The climate will change. Do we want to speed it along? Do we want to adapt to the changing climate with toxins in the water and ground? I don't and thankfully many others share my opinion. I do not believe we are at liberty to do as we please to the environment and it is proper for society to intervene through its government.
I do see where you're coming from - and I tentatively agree except on two points
if there is zero financial incentive to help out the Earth
I would argue that there's a HUGE financial incentive. The company/person that comes up with the "next big thing" in fuel sources is going to be incomprehensibly wealthy - I think that much is clear.
and it's cheaper to keep doing it
I think supply and demand almost guarantees that it will not always been cheaper. Maybe not on an acceptable timeline, but, its obvious that at some point it will become prohibitively expensive to continue to use fossil fuels.
I also feel like your rich people reference is sort of a catch-all FUD argument. Oh no, those terrible rich people are causing all the problems. There are plenty of people on this very forum that are probably rich by most standards. Surprisingly, that doesn't make them faceless evil monsters.
>I would argue that there's a HUGE financial incentive. The company/person that comes up with the "next big thing" in fuel sources is going to be incomprehensibly wealthy - I think that much is clear.
the economical analysis shows that nuclear fusion energy wouldn't be cheaper than the price of coal's energy [4c/kwt], thus without government intervention like carbon emissions pricing and explicit forcing of phasing out of fossil fuels this type of energy is out of question. The arithmetic is similar for other alternative sources as well.
As supply of carbon based fuels dwindles, their price will go up. The fact that carbon based fuels are currently cheaper than any alternative backs my argument. As soon as they aren't cheaper - the market will shift.
>As soon as they aren't cheaper - the market will shift.
or there wouldn't be any market anymore. It is also possible that they will be cheaper for centuries to come - the amount of coal and oil reachable in the next 50-100 years just isn't known. And the higher the price, the less demand, thus the less the price - the free-market behavior which has kept the price of oil pretty stable since WWII. Instead of flying cars [more fuel consumption] people of San Francisco are biking. As a result we have civilization developed into Facebook instead of homes on Mars [the last statement is (C) of another HN commenter]
It is plain stupid for the human race to sit and wait until the price of oil will go up instead of stimulating development of new technologies [some of which can carry us at least to closest planets].
There's a huge financial incentive for discovering the next big thing precisely because carbon based fuels will not always be cheapest - One leads into to the other.
Also - if you surround text with asterisks you'll get italics.
Ah thanks. I guess what I mean is that most truly world-shattering discoveries are driven by heavy amounts of funding from national governments. Private industry might build an electric car that is affordable for the masses, but it isn't going to discover something as long-term or pie in the sky as nuclear fusion. I just don't see them spending the time, effort, and money on that sort of research.
This is something that cannot be sorted by the market without regulation. The problem is that most of the costs incurred by driving in a city centre are incurred by people other than the driver: the pollution, noise, risk of death to pedestrians, the vast amount of space required by roads & parking lots, the massive number of dollars required to build & maintain these roads, et cetera. The driver pays for none of that. If your driver paid a dollar or two per mile to cover these externalities, suddenly there would be very few drivers. With very few drivers, those massive streets suddenly become very valuable underused property and would quickly become repurposed.
That's true to a certain extent: many of the costs are indeed incurred by people other than the driver. By no means all of the costs, though. I'm sitting in Starbucks in central London right now (heading to the London Clojure Dojo in a few minutes :-). I got here by train and on the tube and I wouldn't dream of driving here. Looking out of the window, most of the vehicles that I see are buses and taxis, with very few private cars in evidence. It looks like a lot of people agree with me and wouldn't dream of driving here.
In my experience, many of the world's big cities have already driven private cars away (at least from the centre) and replaced them with an efficient public transportation system. Cities such as New York to Melbourne to Hong Kong are similar. The reason is that the driver really does pay a cost, being stuck in a traffic jam. If the public transportation system is good enough then it's an easy choice not to drive.
Of course, London already changes motorists to drive in the centre of the city so maybe that tips the balance even further away from car drivers.
Libertarian city probably wouldn't have a petrol cars from the beginning, because with exhaust you aggress against others property and you should have a permit from all of them for polluting their property. And it's hard to get all that permits without a government, who forbid to sue the polluters in the name of progress :)
This is such an easy straw-man target that will keep tons of politicians appearing to be busy and working on something really important. It will win them votes and by the time it actually starts to work nobody would really care about it anymore (because of what you say).
I agree with you. I live in Europe and I'm sick with news like this. I would consider myself a fan of electric cars. I'm sure I'll be getting one within the next 10 years. I don't need no one forcing me. They are simply better cars.
If Government want's to force me, please ask me (through vote) and give it at least some amount of legitimacy.
I haven't even seen the legislation for this, but as we europeans get more accostomed to the EU, we figure out we just have to deal with what Brussels say. It just pops off somewhere deep in the news.
And by making it a 40 year projection, they take out the urgency for people to react, knowing that in 20 years it has gained ligitimacy because no one had spoken out against it for so long. It's smooth dictatorship, but still dictatorship.
I think I'm getting why Americans always complain about Washington. But I think Brussels is even worse. Picture an American Union where legislation gets passed by some Bureau in Panama and other locations that were chosen by this Bureau on behalf of which regions need to be subsidized through Armies of public officials.
I've often wondered about this. What would happen, were we to exhaust our petroleum resources?
What concerns me, is that petroleum has many uses, fuel being the main one. By restraining petroleum use as an energy source, we could keep using it for other purposes, such as deriving petrochemicals (plastics in particular).
Now, some might say that plastics and other petroleum products are bad for the environment, and should be replaced / avoided. I'm no petrochemical expert, and I don't know much about the alternatives, but I think plastics still have some important uses in many field, and I'm not sure how feasible it is to do without them.
I view this as a disturbing assault on individual liberty and freedom. Automobiles and the mobility they offer communities have played a monumentally positive role in the shaping of modern society. In many ways they serve as a form of checks and balances. With automobiles, we can put our kids in better schools, even if they are further away, we can learn about different communities that offer benefits relative to our own (for example lower taxation, more open-minded, etc) and move to them. They give us the ability to fulfill the innate human desire to explore. You may think this is silly but i know with 100% certainty i am far less inclined to take a road trip to new places if it entails connecting on 4 different forms of public transportation. I own a car in the city now, but if i'm not allowed to drive it, where do i put it?
The reality of how this will play out is that it will only further increase the perceived and actual separation of wealth with no descernable improvement in environmental conditions. Property prices are going to sky-rocket since this is essentially government mandated urbanization. Poor people are going to have to live further, commute longer and now wont have access to simple "luxuries". Their employment options will be more limited as will their leisurly activity. Owning a second home, something many people in europe do, becomes that much more difficult. All because the government wants to control how you get to from point A to B.
My goodness, why is this being downvoted? It's a rational presentation of an unpopular position, with some thought-provoking assertions of unintended side-effects: who here is punishing such comments?
I don't know if the EU is taking the right approach. I don't personally see how this kind of deadline will nudge anyone along. Perhaps it will let car manufacturers know that their Britain division will not do as well in 2050 if they do not develop now, but I doubt that's what they were going for. I think the EU needs to provide consumer incentives to buy EVs, such as designated lanes or parking, or tax rebates. Companies producing electric cars are really going out on a limb right now, and until they know that there's some kind of serious demand beyond the environmentally minded, who simply want AN electric car to exist, they can't understand their demographics or create a sense of direction for their R&D. Quite simply, If governments want electric cars to catch on, they need to turn the project into an industry, not a charity effort. And for the industry to catch initially, the companies need to understand the demands of their first customers, those who are most willing to buy. They can build from there. The idea of creating a deadline turns the prospect into more of a charity effort toward the environment, not a self regulating, consumer rich industry. Environmental aspiration is important, which is why the governments need to press the gas pedal in the first place, but the companies need real paying customers to grow, not deadlines.
That, or I'm missing something having to do with the logistics of this whole thing.
It's a good idea in my opinion, although if possible I'd rather they be more aggressive with their time frame. By 2050 we may already have reached Peak Oil. If that happens we may not have enough left to run cars in the city anyway.
Peak Oil is about an inflection point after which the expense of extracting oil rapidly accelerates. It's a cost issue. And those concerned with Peak Oil are afraid that acceleration will be faster than our ability to switch to alternatives, causing a period of cramping where energy jumps from being dirt cheap to tremendously expensive, until we can build out the alternatives (a process that will most certainly take decades).
There will always be oil; we just won't be extracting it after a certain point anyway. 2050 is an easy target for that.
Very true and an excellent point. Even so just taking the cost of production into account, if us would-be buyers are unable to afford what's available then we've still run out as far as being able to drive our cars in the city is concerned. I just hope we can expand our use of alternative energy forms quickly enough so that we don't still have all our eggs in one basket.
Yeah except in Britain apparently because the Tories buggered up our rail system so badly in the 90's we won't have a decent other option, even by then.
The conservative party isn't solely to blame. The 11 year stint with labour didn't exactly lead to a host of improvements.
Furthermore, normally people banning cars in cities are in favour of improve internal city travel via local buses, metros and bicycling. It's not really about the kind of services that National Rail provide.
I would agree and disagree with that. The Tories DID bugger up the rail system and Labour partly put it right by bringing the infrastructure back into public ownership but they should've finished the job. I would argue though that Labour were far to pro-airline and the Tories did at least can the 3rd runway at Heathrow.
Lets face it like a lot of things Britain sits half-way between the US and Europe. We want European rail travel but we aren't prepared to pay the taxes to support it.
"It is right that the EU sets high-level targets for
carbon reduction, however it is not right for them to
get involved in how this is delivered in individual
cities"
My first thought is that it may not be necessary. Petrol will be so expensive by 2030 that only the rich will fill their collectible cars with it, and they are about as likely to drive them around the cities as the Baron Montagu commuting in his Rolls Royce Phantom.
I reckon we have about a decade of reasonably affordable petrol left before we hit the wall in a big way. 2050 is way past crunch time. By 2050, nanotech should be in full effect. This idea is a gesture, nothing more.
If nanotech is in full effect then yes, flying cars all around, in fact we shall have to do all we can do stop those lighter than air buggers drifting off willy nilly.
I, uh, don't suppose you noticed who that report was by?
Certain parties, namely oil companies and OPEC members, have an extremely strong vested interested in "business as usual". BP being one of those parties. A measure of common sense, however, should assure you that despite the corporate assurances there is reason indeed to be concerned. There is no profit in the corporations and oil states blowing the whistle now; quite the opposite.
Do longbets.com et al do actual bets, including counter-bets? Because I would put quite a lot of money against $5/gallon gas, inflation adjusted, in 2030.
If you look at KSA, UAE production in 2009. They are down 10%+ on 2008.
To me, it seems very likely that the diminishing Energy Return on Energy Invested will not support [cheap] oil prices at a level that will allow Western Countries such as the United States to remain out of recession.
Much of the current 'proved reserves' include tar sands and heavy and inaccessible oils that are expensive and polluting to process, that are not economic to produce at a bbl cost of less than say $80.
As China and India grow, they will continue to account for a larger and larger share of oil imports, pushing up prices, and reducing the quantity of oil available to the United States to import.
This chart shows unleaded gasoline delivered to gas retailers in the US. We are roughly 20% off the highs, with very little spare oil, judging by the rising prices. The corresponding Chinese chart on the other hand...
http://www.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&...
If anyone wants to look further, www.theoildrum.com presents varied commentary on some of these issues.
The time value of money is also a statement of our exponential decrease in our knowledge of the future. If you knew the future precisely, the time value of money wouldn't decrease into the future.
This statement is worthless. The politicians who would be responsible for actually telling people that yes, its actually time to get these things off the road are teenagers now, and those making this pronouncement today are going to be dead.
Anything past about 2030 is worthless, and any statements about where a government will be ten years from now is very, very suspect. Especially a (putative) democracy, since it's a claim about what the populace of forty years from now will be willing to do. Please. If you could plan that well and accurately we would live in a very, very different world.
because a gallon of fuel/oil is the real unit of value in the economy, convertible across the world, and compare to gold it isn't confined to narrow segments of economy/population. The paper/electronic money is just reflection of it.
Even though you see those buses spewing black smoke from the top, and even though a lot of them run with just a couple people some of the time, in just about every American city, if you net it out they are saving gas (and therefore emissions, which are directly proportional) by a factor of 15-20x.
It's a fact that 30-45% of traffic [1] in urban centers is caused by people cruising around looking for a parking spot. With more public transportation, not only do you reduce this traffic, you reduce regular traffic (less cars), and perhaps most importantly, you increase the economic productivity of the city since instead of erecting giant parking garages, they can erect giant office buildings and condo buildings - which, by the way, has the small added side effect of putting you closer to your job anyway since now you don't have to commute across five parking garages just to get to work.
Taxation and skewed incentives are bad, but let's be honest that's the reason why we have too many cars and roads to begin with. more public transportation in cities is a good thing.
The reason the suburbs blew up is because of skewed incentives. They blew up because everyone and their mother was able to take out a loan on a car they couldn't afford, and fill it with gas that costs half as much as what the rest of the world pays. It's not a good thing, and I'm not sure why you would try and argue that it is. Suburbs aren't where we ought to be and I'm happy to expand on why if you'd like.
Furthermore, electric vehicles and the like don't help the situation. If your car suddenly gets 60mpg instead of 20, it's only going to ENCOURAGE you to drive all the way across the state to get that special jar of peanut butter you like, instead of walking down the block to the corner store. as a result, we need to build more roads to get you to your precious peanut butter; and the new roads in turn invite more traffic, etc.
The solution is urban development with appropriate public transportation. Now, people hear the word "public" in public transportation and instantly think that it has to be funded by the government in an inefficient way. But I have been saying for a long time that that's absolutely not true. What we really mean to say is mass transit.
The New York subway system, which is one of the first and best subways in the world, were originally run by a couple of different private companies. Most cities in the world (outside the US) have free-market taxi systems that are 10x cheaper than what we pay here. and the private el trains and streetcars that used to be all over NYC before the government did away with them were even better.
Here's another interesting line of reasoning to chew on: banning cars in the city would go a long way to making public transportation more profitable for the city. think about it this way, the reason public buses need such huge subsidies to survive is because every person that rides a bus is freeing up space for someone else on the highway, actually making it MORE desirable for that other person to drive rather than ride the bus. but if you remove the option to drive, then you get around this problem and you don't have to pay extra (subsidy) for that person who looked out his window and saw that there was one less car on the road.
Also note that I'm taking about commuter-distance travel and less- intercity rail is a whole other story to go into.
If you live in a sprawl area like Tampa, naturally that's what you will think about, but Tampa is not the future. Tampa is a fine place, but it grew up as a result of bad policies and incentives. The future is cities like Shanghai, London, Hong Kong - these are the cities with the largest GDP growth over the last 25 years and projected for the next 25. Coincidentally, these are also the cities with the best mass transit- London is widely regarded as having the best bus, rail and metro system in the world; Shanghai has the longest and fastest-growing metro system in the world; and of course 90% of all daily journeys in Hong Kong are on public transport.
The smaller, newer cities that are "hot" in terms of growth are also mostly in China, and where there is no mass transit yet developed, bicycles are the main mode of transport.
The 20+ year historical trend of the US pop is towards urbanization, and that's not stopping. In 2000, 58% of the US pop [2] lived in cities of 200,000 or greater. The WORLD's population (yes, think of even the nearly one billion rural Chinese) is expected to be 70% urban [3] by 2050.
The future waits for no one!
Another note: We don't have to transplant people; it happens naturally. That's the power of markets. Just look at the changes in population of Detroit vs. New York over the last 20 years. See also The Great Migration [4]
man, you took the time to write the post. I'll address just one point:
>Furthermore, electric vehicles and the like don't help the situation. If your car suddenly gets 60mpg instead of 20, it's only going to ENCOURAGE you to drive all the way across the state to get that special jar of peanut butter you like, instead of walking down the block to the corner store. as a result, we need to build more roads to get you to your precious peanut butter; and the new roads in turn invite more traffic, etc.
1. electric vehicles will for quite some time be limited in range. 150mi currently feasible in $30K car would
at best be 600-800mi if some of the promising research reach productization
2. the main limiting factor in the driving to get the butter is the human time. Most of the people in the developed countries value their time high enough.
3.wrt. "new roads" - it is a bit far fetched for today, yet for 2050 year can we assign at least a bit higher than 0 probability of "flying car" ? :)
> If your car suddenly gets 60mpg instead of 20, it's only going to ENCOURAGE you to drive all the way across the state to get that special jar of peanut butter you like, instead of walking down the block to the corner store.
For the benefit of interested parties, this is known as "the Jevons Paradox".
2050 doesn't really seem to be soon enough to cause any action. There will be people hemming and hawing, and by the time 2050 rolls around, the deadline will be 2100.
