Comment by dimitar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dimitar | Hacker News Reader

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Contrary to what the article claims ("Transportation is a huge, looming, and almost entirely unsolved climate problem") transportation can be a solved problem. If you notice one of the graphs while transportation is the top emitter hasn't increased much since 2005 and it is very sensitive to oil prices.

Carbon taxes or excise taxes on fuel are the solution. They are endorsed by most economists (often in addition to emissions trading). Taxes must be imposed on emitting greenhouse gasses or at least on purchasing fuels; in addition a cap must be placed on the total amount of emissions.

If you are libertarian and you feel like there are too many taxes already - the carbon tax can either substitute other taxes or the revenue from it can be returned to tax-payers in some form.

Vox itself recently had an article about carbon taxes in California, it includes a part where the collected revenue is then redistributed back to citizens: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/5/3/15512258...

> "If you are libertarian and you feel like there are too many taxes already - the carbon tax can either substitute other taxes or the revenue from it can be returned to tax-payers in some form."

If there's one thing libertarians love, it's redistributing money through the government.

I think the term "redistribution" adds confusion to the issue. The idea behind a carbon tax like that is that polluters owe everyone else something (they're taking from tax payers in various ways: air quality, property value, life expectancy), and the easiest way for them to pay up is through a tax. Viewed through that lens, libertarians may view a carbon tax as getting rid of free-rider pollution producers. The value of those things being given up in exchange for whatever is being produced is no longer being completely ignored. It would also have the effect of restricting the least efficient/profitable pollution producing processes.

I'm torn on environmental taxes. As an economist, I see them as a truly vital form of offsetting negative externalities. The problem is that environmental externalities can be very hard to measure, and it often becomes political, rather than emperical. Worse, is that taxes only get larger over time (and very very rarely sunset, even if legislation specifies a sunset claus). This makes me very nervous about something as nebulous as a "carbon" tax. Carbon is in nearly everything we care about on this planet, and it feels like it's opening a pandora's box.

For things like transportation I'd much rather see a "miles traveled" tax than a carbon tax (it could even be tiered for electric vehicles). It's far more specific, and thus harder to lead to crazy far reaching taxes in tangential areas.

> I'd much rather see a "miles traveled" tax than a carbon tax

Why? The harm done is relative to emissions, which is exactly proportional to the volume of fuel going in. A tax on miles traveled would unfairly punish cars with great (or infinite) gas mileage. (Unless you think the relevant externality is cars on the road...)

A few externalities do happen from cars on the road. Oil leaks are one. Aerosol pollution (black carbon type) from wearing down tires on the road. Roadkill impact on wildlife.

But they're dwarfed by non-environmental factors like road wear-and-tear, and accidents, which are covered by other taxes and insurance.

> Worse, is that taxes only get larger over time (and very very rarely sunset, even if legislation specifies a sunset claus)

The past 40 years of politics shows that this is simply not true in reality, though it is often repeated. There is significant political will to lower taxes, and taxes get lowered frequently. More frequently on the wealthy, but frequently nonetheless.

When it comes to taxing externalities and improving market function, there's often significant room to improve the market. As long as costs can be estimated within ~50% it's going to be a big win to legislate them. However, since the cost of going over is often not linear, it can be difficult to enforce in a fair way in the market without some sort of auction scheme like what goes on in cap & trade.

A miles tax is far worse than a carbon tax; it's far more of a stab in the dark. It doesn't even account for wear & tear in any way, which is dependent on an polynomial of the vehicle weight.

Large fossil fuel companies, like Exxon, are planning on an $80/ton carbon tax. There's zero reason to not phase this in along with the Paris accords. It's silly to ignore the work that those, negatively affected by the tax, have already agreed is going to happen.

The parent poster is correct - I think you may have confused tax rates with taxes collected.

Source: http://www.justfacts.com/taxes.asp (tons of footnotes there to bea.gov

Considering that both tax rates and taxes collected go both up and down, in your plots, what do you think I've confused here?

>A miles tax is far worse than a carbon tax; it's far more of a stab in the dark. It doesn't even account for wear & tear in any way,

I would assume that the tax rate would be based on vehicle class, but that seems too easy.

You're assuming ignorance on the part of libertarians. However I think you'll find that many understand the problem of externalities fine and simply disagree with the common tax "solution" taught in Econ 101 classes around the country.

Some example reading to open your mind: https://mises.org/library/externalities-argument

Having read that, I'm not finding myself enlightened or my mind opened in the least. What was the point, other than it's hard to calculate externalities?

Argument that "it's hard" is not much of an argument at all. It does make me think that there's considerable flexibility in a "libertarian" position on externalities though.

It's not hard, it's impossible. Prices are revealed through transaction only..

I read your comment earlier and saved it for later. I too find myself unenlightened.

Fine it's impossible to correctly calculate externalities. I don't see the line from there to: "BigCo dumped a ton of waste in my pond, but it's unfair for the government coerce BigCo to compensate me because there's a chance the I might get more than the true value of that pond."

Do you own the pond? As long as property rights exist and are enforced you could negotiate a settlement with BigCo

That's an article of faith, not an article of fact.

But I do agree that the best pricing schemes involve settling on price through transaction. Take, for example, cap & trade schemes. This is a widely used mechanism to manage negative externalities.

Externalities exist, whether or not the "Austrian" school has a way to deal with them. Considering the issue, deciding that one's philosophy can't deal with them, and therefore deciding to stick one's head in the sand instead is why mises.org remains fringe. It's an irrational, religious framework.

>That's an article of faith, not an article of fact.

Read Mises Human Action and you will understand.. Austrian economics is a priori (built from first principles) not a posteriori (empirically derived)

If they are in favor of the government redistributing assets through force when enforcing contracts, hopefully they can understand the concept of externalities and the need for fees on externalities in order for markets to work better. Of course, that's assuming that the libertarian is also in favor of using free markets optimally.

> Electricity wastes two-thirds of its primary energy; transportation wastes about three-quarters.

The electricity generation waste I'm willing to take at face value, but only because I am somewhat familiar with the concepts of conversion factor loss and line loss. I find both of these assertions require digging into the footnotes to understand better. Their presentation is a little too hand wavy. I'm really at a loss to understand what the transportation waste means. Sure, you also need to propel the mass of the vehicle. Is it comparing every other vehicle to a bicycle? I don't know.

Transportation waste is the inefficiency of the internal combustion engine.

The presentation isn't "hand wavy", it's just simplified. Most of the confusion in this thread is from users who don't understand relatively simple aspects of how energy is generated and used. Which is fine, but the response to that should be to look something up or ask a question, not attack the graphic.

Well actually there is an article along with the very fine graphic. I think the article could have expended a few more sentences on energy waste. That's all. This wasn't an attack.

The fact the tailpipe on your car ejects a lot of useless heat is waste. Similarly, a car's radiator is ejecting a lot of useless heat. Sure, tracking this feels hand-wavy but using less fuel because you drive less is different from using less fuel because the engine is more efficient.

However, this stuff still very simplified as lighter cars use less fuel even without changing the % of waste energy generated.

> lighter cars use less fuel even without changing the % of waste energy generated.

Yes, but they reduce the total Joules of energy wasted, and that's the important point.

And that would be reflected in the graph at hand. I know we're all talking percentages, but the graph is actually about total quantity. If everyone were in very light cars, the transportation bar would be narrower, and the total energy going to the Waste node would be smaller.

So it's accurately reflecting any efficiencies of that kind.

Heat is energy. Any heat that enters the atmosphere is energy you're giving up.

99% of energy from gasoline ends up as heat, but saying it's ~0% useful energy is not really meaningful.

> I'm really at a loss to understand what the transportation waste means. Sure, you also need to propel the mass of the vehicle.

Total work done by the vehicle / total energy contained the fuel.

A small combustion engine is a very inefficient converter of energy, so it's no surprise that it's only able to use 1/4 of the available energy. The rest is lose as heat (as well as minor losses such as noise and slippage).

This boils down to well-known and well-understood behaviours of energy systems, particularly at large scale.

Much of the waste is simply Carnot efficiency of thermal systems: the amount of useful energy you can extract is proportional to the (absolute) temperatures (Kelvin) of the "hot" and "cold" ends of the cycle.

For thermal electrical generation -- coal-fired plants, gas-fired turbines, oil-fired turbines or diesel generators, biomass thermal, solar thermal, or nuclear plants -- this is in the range of 30 - 45% or so. Ironically, high-temperature thermal coal achieves some of the best thermal efficiency. This doesn't mitigate its far more compelling downsides.

Direct kinetic or photovoltaic electrical generation has no thermal losses, but is subject to the efficiency constraints of the input stream: hydroelectric, wind, or solar PV.

There are additional losses in transmission (about 6%), and in electrical conversion and switching equipment ( ~<10%). The net is about a 66% energy loss in what's delivered to the electrical customer.

For transportation, you have the same Carnot efficiency limits, but given the smaller temperature differential start with a lower initial efficiency -- about 30%. There are additional losses through parasitic systems (any powered in-car features: power steering, brakes, A/C, electrical and electronics, etc.), transmission losses, tire and wind drag.

Again, all well understood and modeled, and well-behaved in large-number populations.

The Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL) has done energy modelling for the United States since the 1970s, and has a set of flow diagrams (Sankey diagrams) showing flows dating to the 1950s, through the present.

> the carbon tax can either substitute other taxes or the revenue from it can be returned to tax-payers in some form

I would be surprised if carbon tax payments offset some other taxes.

California is proposing per-capita dividends for their cap and trade auction revenue.

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/5/3/15512258...

They're simply saying that in terms of tax policy you can do something like:

* Carbon tax forecast for X billion in revenue.

* Let's knock X billion off of income taxes (or whatever else you want).

This is what Washington State tried, although the measure was sadly opposed by "environmentalist" groups like the Sierra Club.

Technically, they didn't oppose it, but they didn't support it either, as members had mixed feelings about the approach, which I'll paraphrase as it partly being a disguised tax cut for the wealthy rather than a revenue neutral carbon fee.

http://www.sierraclub.org/washington/sierra-club-position-ca...

I personally support offsetting carbon taxes against other taxes, but since it would be regressive, I'd lean towards mitigating that in whatever compensatory tax cuts were introduced.

My preferred solution would be to simply take all of the carbon taxes collected and divide them evenly between all residents.

That can work too, though it's still probably regressive, as some people have more resources to adapt than others.

And if the policy is regressive then you face the danger of it blowing up in your face. For example, see what happened when the rich in America seized most of the benefits of globalisation, now we have Presidents threatening to burn it all down and being popular in doing so. If you actually want carbon reduce toon to be successful you need to factor in the politics, both getting the wealthy and powerful on board and getting the average man in the street to feel that he's not being screwed (which some people will tell him he is, even if he isn't).

Maybe, but I would kind of assume that poorer people already end up emitting a lot less carbon since most carbon emitting activities already have a significant cost involved.

I'm not so sure: poorer people often have to drive further, in clunkier cars. In any event, it's likely more 'regressive' than income: a rich person might earn 10X, but generate 2X the carbon. I bet there's data for this, though.

Because of the refund, 2X the carbon doesn't mean 2X the taxes. Someone who emits 120% of the average amount of carbon pays twice as much as someone who emits 110% of the average, but emits less than 10% more.

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