this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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This is dumb but only because we don't worry about energy use any other time. Tons of places in my city keep all their lights on 24/7 unnecessarily, we all are sitting on a "useless" social media, video games and movies and music are all energy uses. I don't want the government to start limiting energy use on things it deems unimportant. Who gets to decide what counts? Just implement a carbon tax and energy use will go down if people don't want to pay. We don't need to police everyone's usage, we just need the cost to actually reflect the externalities.
We could just solve the problem the capitalist way and just charge businesses extra for their power usage. That'll get them to care.
Currently at least in the US we charge them less. This is usually due to something called Economy of Scale. As well as the fact there is more competition for Business energy. As well as the fact they are usually locked into a contract for energy. 1
I want to agree with you, but crypto mining is orders of magnitude more energy than the worst lazy energy leaks.
Not that I don't believe you, but do you have a source for that?
There were sources in the article that says that Bitcoin mining basically wasted a countries worth of resources, increasing our overall electric bills.
Yeah I see that now. Thanks for pointing it out. It did take a minute to go through and find the actual sources as The Verge likes to source themselves. So I'll put the two (at least I think) sources.
This source shows where most of the mining is taking place.
This is the second source that shows how much Energy is being consumed.
So true. These fu**ing schools keeping their lights on the whole night and vacations, with their old lamps, while people like me measure their lamps and turn everything off...
Also the amount of 4K or more useless data transfer, ads, unnecessary youtube videos where there could be only audio (if they made that free, you can use any FOSS client and do the same)
With Carbon tax only the rich win, we need carbon credits
No it’s really really easily to implement taxation that’s not regressive.
A progressive tax that means the biggest users pay the most would probably be ideal (but then that's mostly true in every situation)
Why is it not that way already?
Because it would affect rich folks more, so they spend some money now to convince lawmakers not to charge them more later.
So it's not so easy to implement after all
Did I say easy? I think I said ideal.
How comes I never saw that implemented, then? Progressive taxation stops "progressing" at around the 100k threshold and that's basically just a decent salary. The Rich are never really affected by it.
Carbon credits would be a way to level the ground in some situations and could give you a right to say NO to people consuming more than their share, or at least account for externalities and get paid if you allow them to use your "quota".
Even so, consumer electricity habits make up a fraction of the carbon emissions on Earth. People driving cars, people buying plastic bullshit, or factory farming creates more emissions singularly.