What Are the Best Policies to Solve Climate Change?

February 15, 2019 9:55 AM

The Energy Policy Solutions Simulator " lets users test different policy options and see the results instantly" for carbon dioxide emissions reduction in Canada, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Poland and the United States
posted by the man of twists and turns (19 comments total)

This is really, deeply interesting. Thanks the man of twists and turns!
posted by Cookiebastard at 10:49 AM on February 15, 2019

Meanwhile, the Fridays for future school strikes inspired by Greta Thunberg keep growing. Check out the clips on her Twitter account to see. It's inspiring!
posted by homunculus at 11:03 AM on February 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

I tried the Canadian one, and some of the assumptions seem a little weird. The transportation+construction options feel like they are hinting at a future where we're all driving electric cars and living in slightly more efficient McMansions, instead of one where people drive less and live closer together.

7 out of the 8 transportation policy options involve buying more efficient cars and using cleaner fuel. Only the Transportation Demand Management one hints at driving less, and it lumps a ton of unrelated policies together: "improved public transit systems, more walking and bike paths, zoning for higher density along transit corridors, zoning for mixed-use developments, roadway and congestion pricing, and increased parking fees".

Likewise, the Buildings and Appliances section doesn't even hint at changing the form of new buildings (i.e. moving from large single-family houses toward multifamily buildings). It's mostly about better insulation and strapping solar to the same buildings we're already building.
posted by ripley_ at 11:29 AM on February 15, 2019 [7 favorites]

Man I got a huge bump in the US just by eliminating the coal industry but setting up methane capture and worker training felt good too
posted by The Whelk at 11:29 AM on February 15, 2019

Hey, look, I cut emissions in half just by implementing industrial carbon pricing.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:35 AM on February 15, 2019

Brutally punitive carbon taxes lookin' pretty good right now.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 11:41 AM on February 15, 2019 [6 favorites]

Meanwhile, the Fridays for future school strikes inspired by Greta Thunberg keep growing. Check out the clips on her Twitter account to see. It's inspiring!
posted by homunculus at 2:03 PM on February 15 [1 favorite −] [!]

Homunculus, a young friend of mine whom I taught in Sunday School back a few years ago is organizing the Tallahassee school strikes. I had no idea how huge the movement was!
posted by Cookiebastard at 11:49 AM on February 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

I spent a lot of time dinking around making people buy electric motorbikes and replace gas kitchen ranges and label things' energy efficiency, and the needle barely moved. Forest and land-use stuff was somewhat more effective. Then, I tried brutally punitive carbon taxes, and, just, blam-o!
posted by box at 12:55 PM on February 15, 2019 [5 favorites]

Ahh, so “money talks and bullshit walks” works for greening the economy, too?
posted by notyou at 1:18 PM on February 15, 2019

Is there a button for nationalizing the gas and coal companies just to shut them down?

Because that should be a button.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 3:01 PM on February 15, 2019 [3 favorites]

Brutally punitive carbon taxes lookin' pretty good right now.

I know the chances of it passing is slim, but we really need to be building support for a bill like the recently reintroduced H.R.763 Energy Innovation and Carbon Fee and Dividend act. The price starts at $15/ton and increases $10 per year, with a provision to bump that up to $15/year if targets aren't being met.
posted by bread-eater at 3:30 PM on February 15, 2019 [5 favorites]

I love this. So many tuning options. Would love a modeler with this ease for food production against climate and policy. I'm glad that the comments haven't devolved into nit-picking some of the assumptions and limits, because clearly the broad implications are well established even if you think you might impose demand reductions in excess of model permissions.

I enjoyed mapping the runs of existing technologies. I also dabbled in some year 2020 100% implementations, and you can really make things go wild in the R& D section.

Three fun scenario goals: how quickly can you kill off coal and nuclear? (haven't managed to kill petroleum or nat gas in any scenario) I also keep inadvertantly killing off hydro by an abundance of wind and solar.
How fast can you bend the tangent to the human emissions curve negative past 2035?
How fast can you get the human emissions to go negative (can't).
How fast can you get the human emissions to go negative large enough to counter act the emissions from wild-fires, thawing permafrost, destabilized methance-clathrate, lost reflectivity of artic ice, soil warming...(can't)

A good tool.
posted by Anchorite_of_Palgrave at 8:06 PM on February 15, 2019

Hey now, my spending starts paying itself back by 2032! And then it explodes! Long term investment in efficiency and nonpolluting technology!
posted by The Whelk at 9:45 PM on February 15, 2019

Merely a $100 tax for Electricity, $200 tax for Industry, plus maximal ($60 / MWh) subsidies for Wind and Solar bring it down to well below the 2025 Paris accord targets. So that's pretty doable without Green New Deal level reform. But it doesn't come close to the 2050 goal (below 1500), and I didn't see anything in that widget that did. If we really want that, it will take much more substantial changes -- not just aggressive policies, but structural changes to the world system.

Relatedly: does anyone know why the default baseline prediction to 2050 is basically flat, given that CO2 has been fairly steeply declining for the US (and also Europe) since 2010? (Eg, see the NYT widget that draws on these data.) Just a simple linear extrapolation from 2000 would have us down to 3500 by 2050 without any new policy interventions at all. Does anyone know where this baseline comes from? I think I saw something somewhere saying it was the annual EIA report, but I don't understand this stuff well enough to see exactly where in there this baseline is coming from, if indeed that report is the source. If it is coming from there, there definitely seem to be various odd assumptions about future trends, especially about energy use in the next 30 years. For instance, they project that natural gas use will continue its astronomical increase linearly until 2050, while they project that after precipitously falling since 2000, coal use will somehow plateau for the next 30 years right around its current levels; and even in their low-use scenario, that plateau holds (p 91 of the report). These seem like pretty big projection errors, and they shape the entire system of policy planning everyone is engaging in with these tools.

But if anyone knows better where these baseline projections are coming from please enlighten me. This is not some effort to minimize the predicament we're in, but if we're going to be as empirical as possible about this, it's worth knowing if these baselines are reliable. As it is, they look kind of like the annual predictions you see for various clean energy industries, which every year seem to predict that growth will be linear for the foreseeable future and are wrong every year. ...Which, now that I google it, are often coming from EIA itself...
posted by chortly at 9:46 PM on February 15, 2019

I did manage to get it under 1500 (just) by 2050 by ...taxing industries out of existence, flooding R&D sectors, and maxing out every efficiency adaptation and rebuild, etc. I basically said yes, MORE to everything.
posted by The Whelk at 10:04 PM on February 15, 2019

Civilization VI’s new expansion is a disaster-filled look at climate change

re: #FridaysForFuture, merkel implies german kids' climate protests are russian influenced (but then walks it back), winning young hearts and minds.
posted by kliuless at 8:00 AM on February 16, 2019

breadeater: I know the chances of it passing is slim, but we really need to be building support for a bill like the recently reintroduced H.R.763 Energy Innovation and Carbon Fee and Dividend act. The price starts at $15/ton and increases $10 per year, with a provision to bump that up to $15/year if targets aren't being met.

Sounds similar to what Canada's doing - it goes into effect April 1 in Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and New Brunswick. (Each province can either implement carbon pricing itself, which the other provinces are doing; or the federal government will impose a federal carbon tax, divide up the revenue, and return it directly to households in the province, in the form of a refundable tax credit.) It's currently being challenged in court by Saskatchewan and Ontario, and it'll be a major issue in the October federal election.

The Pembina Institute has more information on the Canadian version of the simulator: Try out your climate policy ideas. There's an accompanying research paper .

What I found most interesting about the simulation: the current Canadian plan (the "Pan-Canadian Framework"), which sets a carbon price floor of C$20/t this year, rising $10/t each year to $50/t in 2022, is often slammed from the left for being too weak to meet our 2030 target (30% below 2005 levels). But it turns out that if we simply continue increasing the carbon price floor by $10/t each year after 2022, that's enough to meet the 2030 target!

The PCF includes complementary policies aimed at decarbonizing specific sectors, like phasing out coal-fired power by 2030, improving fuel efficiency and increasing the proportion of zero-emissions vehicles, reducing methane emissions from industry, and so on. But carbon pricing is the backbone of the plan.

The advantages and disadvantages of a steadily rising carbon tax:

• It's cost-effective. We start by looking for ways to cut emissions that are worth less than $20/t, then those between $20/t and $30/t, and so on. So we're always cutting the cheapest, least valuable emissions, wherever they are in the economy.
• It's simple to set up and administer. The tax is basically a sales tax on fossil fuels. The dividend is paid through the existing tax system.
• It's not intrusive. In a decentralized economy, a steadily rising carbon price is the least intrusive way to cut emissions.
• It relies on people's self-interest. With a carbon tax, households and businesses have a direct incentive to look for ways to cut emissions. (It doesn't matter whether they believe that climate change is real or not.)
• It protects low- and middle-income households, because the money is divided up equally. Spending on fossil fuels is skewed to the top: high-income households have more money to spend, they have larger houses to heat, and they're less sensitive to the price of gas. In Alberta, for example, the top 20% of households by income spent 2X as much on fossil fuels and electricity as the bottom 20%, and 1.5X the average. So higher-income households pay a larger share of the tax, while receiving an equal share of the dividend. The Canadian government estimates that 70% of households are better off after paying the tax and receiving the dividend.
• It's not a tax grab - the federal government doesn't keep any of the money, so it's not increasing the size of the government, and it doesn't transfer any money between provinces (which is a sensitive topic in the Canadian political context). And a province can set up its own carbon-pricing system and decide what to do with the revenue, so long as its carbon price rises along with the national carbon price floor.
• The big disadvantage: nobody likes paying taxes, and a carbon tax (especially on gasoline) is a highly visible tax. So it's not likely to be popular! (Even the dividend may not help when voters mistrust the government.) A democratic government can only bring it in if it has sufficient political capital to survive the subsequent election.

Of course in a democracy, to deal with a long-term problem like climate change, you need a degree of political consensus, so that the opposition doesn't just rip up your climate policy the next time it takes power. So the true test will be whether the opposition Conservative Party accepts the need for climate policy (their current position appears to be to do nothing, or as little as possible). The first step is to defeat them in the October election.
posted by russilwvong at 8:08 AM on February 16, 2019 [2 favorites]

fwiw...
How to decarbonize America — and the world:

Carbon Taxes. I spent much of 2015 advocating for a revenue-neutral carbon tax in Washington State. I love carbon taxes. And in electricity, they can be quite powerful. As I explain elsewhere, though, outside of the electricity sector, carbon taxes are far less effective than believed. They have only a little impact on industry, almost no impact on transportation, and usually aren’t applied to agriculture. If a carbon tax magically passed Congress, I’d cheer, and it could be an effective way to fund some of the proposals here. It’s not a silver bullet, though, and it doesn’t address the hardest sectors.

posted by kliuless at 10:19 AM on February 16, 2019 [2 favorites]

It looks like there's maybe some underlying disagreement, then, between Naam and the Energy Policy Solutions folks. In the widget, while industry carbon taxes are less effective on CO2 than electricity taxes, industry taxes are only about 50% less effective than electricity taxes per dollar -- so smaller, but still the second most effective policy in the widget that I saw after electricity carbon taxes, and far from something that could be called "little impact." I wish it was easier to figure out how these estimated effects (and, as aforementioned, baselines) are calculated.
posted by chortly at 8:52 PM on February 16, 2019 [1 favorite]