this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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Who should pay for climate solutions? The debate is heating up (www.latimes.com)
submitted 9 months ago by silence7 to c/climate
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[–] LilNaib 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The article says:

The Golden State’s poorest residents — those already enrolled in discounted rate programs — would pay small fixed charges.

and

Millionaires and billionaires would be slapped with the same fixed charges as middle-class families struggling to get by

Maybe I'm misreading, or maybe the article is poorly written, but it sounds like everyone would be paying fixed fees.

Setting a fee based on income sounds super error prone and vulnerable to gaming in the same way that the rich can avoid taxation. Imagine a CEO making $1 in salary with the rest in stocks, how would that be charged? Or imagine $1 in salary, but the rest in free housing, food, transportation, etc. What's the overhead for properly monitoring all this? It must be huge to do a credible job. We're already not doing it and repeating the same obvious error can only be assumed to be intentional.

Just remove base fees and charge people for their usage. Poor people already use much less electricity than rich people so they would save money under my proposal, while the people who use more would have to pay more.

[–] silence7 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I agree that better enforcement of income tax payment by the wealthy is important.

Denying that it can be done is just defeatism

[–] LilNaib 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Not saying it can't be done, just that it isn't.

We should work toward proven solutions instead.

[–] silence7 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The Inflation Reduction Act actually included a lot of money to have the IRS catch wealthy tax cheats. It seems to be working.

Since state taxation is based on federal taxation, this should improve state revenue as well.

[–] LilNaib 1 points 9 months ago

I certainly support that.