I was recently thinking about why bitcoin shouldn't just be banned to help mitigate the ongoing climate catastrophe which led to my recent article [0] which equated banning bitcoin to banning ice cream, which I hope helps to illustrate the absurdity of picking and choosing versus just charging for carbon more directly.
Your analysis has one major flaw: It would only make sense if ice cream had as severe a climate impact as bitcoin. I have no reason to believe that it does.
You would have to find a list of things that people enjoy but don't bring societal benefit that add up to bitcoin's climate impact. I assume that list will then either:
• contain things that should actually be banned or
• add up to way more utility for way more people than bitcoin
The idea of societal benefit is very nebulous. It sounds like your idea of it is very different to mine by the fact that you believe in an absolute answer to it.
How do you measure something like societal benefit?
I'm sure we could agree that eradicating disease is very beneficial, but would we disagree about the entire tourism and entertainment industry as a whole?
I can guarantee we have different opinions about the value of things. That's why we should be free to make our own choices. We don't need everyone in the world to help define what "societal benefit" is for them, they can do it every time they pay for something out of their own pocket.
(There is one thing that I think fulfills your criteria though, flights for holidays. They contribute more, and increasingly more, carbon emissions than bitcoin does while delivery little "societal benefit" - whatever that means. However, I'm not arguing anything here because I think it's morally wrong to focus on specific activities that affect a minority of people. And yes, banning taking flights for holidays would only affect a small minority of people globally.)
> The idea of societal benefit is very nebulous. [...] How do you measure something like societal benefit?
That is indeed a very hard problem and one of the mayor challenges of any society. But that doesn't mean that any endeavor that includes this notion is to be avoided. You gave the example of eradicating disease.
> I can guarantee we have different opinions about the value of things. That's why we should be free to make our own choices. We don't need everyone in the world to help define what "societal benefit" is for them, they can do it every time they pay for something out of their own pocket.
But now you are not arguing about ice cream anymore. You seem to be just generally skeptical of a strong centralized government. And you can of course argue that and there are no simple answers here. I was just pointing out that your ice cream argument doesn't hold water.
Unless it is "Any kind of government interference is bad. This is why we shouldn't ban ice cream. Therefore we also shouldn't ban bitcoin." If that is your stance, then ice cream and bitcoin are indeed equivalent for your. But that is probably not the worldview of the people asking for bitcoin to be banned. Then your post does not argue against their view, but against your version of their view.
Economics 101, like all Science 101 courses, is simply wrong and doesn't reflect the world except vaguely from afar. Trying to understand the economy through the lens of economy 101 is like trying to launch a rocket to the moon using only Newton's laws of motion.
Successful governments pick economic winners and losers all the time, and don't let chaotic market forces decide if they need an agriculture sector or R&D.
For a simple example of just how misleading econ 101 is, look at the effect of a minimum wage: by all accounts, it slightly increases employment, the very opposite of econ 101's prediction.
Market forces are not fully understood in complex systems but it does not mean they do not work.
Forcing employers to give more money to employees (rising wages through regulation) may cause some unexpected/unaccounted things (more consumption etc.).
Taxing something (like CO2) will definitely do not help that thing. Solving just Bitcoin problem is both hard (how do you prevent making certain computation while connected to the network, or how do you prevent buying certain digital goods) and is only part of the problem (it does not mean that fixing part of the problem is not worthwhile, but they are easier ways to solve bigger part of the CO2 problem).
They subsidize R&D because there's a public benefit to things like pure math that's difficult to internalize which leads to under supply from the market.
They subsidize agriculture because of lobbying and self-defense considerations.
In both cases, the government identified an under supply due to a market failure, and they judged that the externalized benefit was sufficiently large and so they stepped in to fix it.
In the case of crypto, the market failure is simply that carbon is too cheap. So why not address the actual market failure with a tax. If crypto miners want to keep mining after compensating society for their pollution, more power to them. It's hubris and risky to outright ban something because you just know there's no value there and all the people who ascribe value are wrong. Doing that isn't even analogous to government actions in the two examples you raised. A carbon tax is more analogous (it's sort of like an inverse-subsidiy as per your Ag example).
I like the carbon tax avenue for other reasons too. It's a broad, one shot thing that will roughly aligns incentives across all industries at once. Not perfect but a very good correction that broadly applies.
"by all accounts, it slightly increases employment"
Not by all accounts. The literature is not straight forward in this way. If it is a null effect, I don't see that as an invalidation of econ 101, either. It could just be very inelastic for small changes in the minimum wage with elasticity picking up for larger changes (which nobody doubts would happen).
In practice, there are behaviours which provide no net social benefit, exact tremendous costs, and yet are inherently self-perpetuating. Legal prohibitions can help in this case. It's a form of demand-dampening.
It's only your opinion that there's no social benefit. Which is a problem, because your opinion might be wrong. If you charge people appropriately for their carbon use such that it's no skin off your back if they continue consumption, then you don't risk destroying value in places where your opinion turns out wrong.
I think you're on the wrong side of caution here, if we stop activities and so help to solve climate change, then we can look later at whether those activities people thought were just empty carbon producing were actually supremely beneficial. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, as the saying goes. Bitcoin/altcoins are certainly not vital to survival.
Cut carbon, then make a case for bringing back heavy carbon producing activities that seem to be of little use.
I see you're getting downvoted but maybe "get rid of" isn't the best approach. Certainly taxing air travel at a chunky rate would reduce unnecessary flights.
I mean, if you ignore cargo, sure. If you don't ignore it nor that more fuel is being burned by an average cargo flight (due to more weight compared to a commercial flight), it'd inconvenience everyone.
Expect cargo flight are responsible for a fraction of CO2 emissions from commercial aviation[1].
If you really want to push there are solutions:
Packages just take longer over sea (10-15 days) until we switch to an air ship (2-3) based transport system which doesn't have to pay so much energy of lifting.
Taxing it means : the rich will be able to continue to fly while the poor, not being able to travel anymore because of the tax, will support the burden of climate adaptation. That's not justice.
And that's the issue : climate change requires a global effort and if we want to have the masses to adapt, then we must have the elite to adapt equally.
A frequent flyer tax would help here. Everyone gets a tax-free flight, then a low tax for the next one, and it keeps increasing for more flying. ~23 minutes in this podcast describes it and explains how it'd make a huge impact: https://www.cheerfulpodcast.com/rtbc-episodes/fair-miles
The key stat is it'd be enough to reach the UK's target on carbon emissions from flying by 2050, at a cost of 0% for the first flight and 9% on the second (going up steeply from there). Of course, other countries may have different data but the principle should be the same.
The rich will support the burden of climate adaptation because the income from the tax can be used directly to help mitigate climate change.
The vast majority of flights are taken by a small minority of people; they're taken by the richest. Take the United Kingdom as an example: 70% of all flights were taken by 15% of people [0]. It certainly isn't the poorest taking these flights.
So taxing flights will have less direct impact on the poorest than one might think.
Having said that, I think a charge on carbon is more fair than taxing flights directly.
>A carbon fee and dividend or climate income is a system to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address global warming. The system imposes a carbon tax on the sale of fossil fuels, and then distributes the revenue of this tax over the entire population (equally, on a per-person basis) as a monthly income or regular payment.
They literally said “Let's instead get rid of private air travel”, which I interpreted (reasonably I think) to mean private aviation (where you know the other passengers) not public airline (Delta, KLM, British Air, etc.)
Because private planes are relevant travel amounts to "cause a pandemic", and "People can go on vacation by train instead" makes sense when talking about private planes (vs "can fly commercial"?)?
I agree their conclusion was ridiculous. However, it seems equally ridiculous to conclude “even though they specifically said white, they must have meant black, and for you to read white into their argument is a willful misconstruing of their argument.”
The emissions from aviation are increasing every year, the majority of flights are for holidays rather than business, and only a very small minority of people globally actually take flights.
However, I belive the parent commenter was more pointing out the unfairness of picking and choosing what to ban rather than imposing a blanket charge on carbon.
This seems to have been missed by most, even when considering that the parent is likely correct that flights have a greater, and increasingly greater, impact on climate change than bitcoin does.
I frankly don't think this would make sense. Imagine explaining the people of a country, that they aren't allowed to fly to e.g. Mallorca anymore. The acceptance would be somewhere between low and zero.
Maybe private air travel in one country, e.g. from Munich to Berlin could be reduced, but not international flights without any resistance
I know people making changes in their lives but it does appear hopeless right now.
I drive much less and will look at solar panels eventually an electric car. I know some who already did move in that direction.
I can plant some trees in my yard and make better choices with consumption however, what's to stop countries who still build coal power plants or coal still being mined?
I despair. Many ppl are switching to electric cars thinking they did good, and yet they charge those same cars using energy supplied by burning fossil fuel.
I'm not completely convinced solar panels or electric cars are produced cleanly. More needs to be done about that.
How do we know for sure the energy used to make these are not adding to the problem. Even worse is that old petrol cars will usually be onsold to other countries, so emissions can't be falling?
An individual can only do so much.
Most people will bury their head in the sand. Those who take action may be pissing in the wind without realizing it.
"The vast majority of Bitcoin’s energy consumption happens during the mining process. Once coins have been issued, the energy required to validate transactions is minimal."
Honestly, that doesn't seem particularly well-informed. I wonder how this person thinks transactions are committed to the blockchain, and how this is separate from the mining process?
Unless they literally mean "the energy required to consult the ledger of previous transactions", which doesn't seem a useful metric.
The quote you referenced makes the distinction between committing (mining) transactions and validating. The energy used to validate transactions is indeed minimal.
The energy used for validation is a useful metric because it's how the bitcoin network can afford to stay decentralized.
The confusion comes from how the miners are compensated for their energy burning. Currently, it's mostly by the block subsidy, which is independent of the amount of transactions in a block. But in a decade or two, that will be dominated by transaction fees, and we can actually attribute the energy cost to the transaction amount.
