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Comment by Felz | Hacker News Reader

The article's central point seems to be that it's more difficult to track accountability and causality in an increasingly "overheated" and complicated world. True.

But the major system for addressing that currently seems to be People Getting Upset, and the article proposes more organizations for People Getting Upset. But this isn't very efficient; sometimes the global economy DOES need to make Gladstone a bit less pretty. And people have only a limited amount of Upset within them, not nearly enough to make the system work well.

We need better tools of addressing externalities as a society.

Or maybe just the ability to actually implement those we have. Property rights work pretty well where they can apply. Carbon taxes seem decent, but they usually go straight to government coffers and don't pay out to citizens (that seems like a flaw to me). I'm not an economist, but I'd be interested in better ideas.

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Carbon taxes change the profit math for companies, which affects their decisions, that's the biggest change. They have to be high enough to change the decision though.

US$120 / ton of pure carbon, or about $32/ton CO2 should be about right. Ramp it up over 6 years, front loaded a bit, starting with $30/ton C, increasing $15/ton carbon per year.

If that were done in a largely revenue neutral way on a worldwide scale, we could turn carbon emission around in a hurry. I'd actually advocate for putting aside some of the money to reward people actively removing airborne carbon dioxide down to the 290ppm threshold, not just holding at 400ppm.

I think a CO2 tax should be applied to capital equipment at the time of sale for best effect.

That creates some disincentives towards efficiency, and operation of equipment is often a much larger carbon source than initial manufacture.

I think in practice it would work like a VAT, which is well understood and creates a reasonably level playing field.

What I mean is instead of slapping a carbon tax on gasoline you slap it on the car. So if a car is slated to emit 60 tons of CO2 during it's expected life you compute a excise tax based on 60 tons.

Right, but that's too broad. Some people will drive a car for a million miles, some people will drive it for ten thousand. It's better to tax the embodied carbon of manufacture and delivery of the car separately from the carbon emitted by the fuel, for example. Fuels, in particular, are easy to determine the carbon weight - just add it up!

The problem with imposing a tax on fuel is your punish people for decisions they made before you changed the policy tax regime. Where taxing new equipment doesn't. The former tends to result in a lot of political blowback.

> They have to be high enough to change the decision though.

This is why I've stopped listening to people attempting to make externality-based policy arguments. If you believe that a carbon tax needs to be high enough to change companies' decisions, you're not actually making an externality argument. You've already decided that the world should change, and how it should change, and you're just trying to find some magic words that you think will get other people to agree with you.

A real externality argument would try to determine the value of the externality, and set the tax to equal that value. It's not relevant at all whether that changes anyone's decision -- if there's no change, and you see just as much pollution as before, that's fine, because the cost of that pollution is now being accounted for correctly, and it's been decided that the pollution was better than the alternative.

Seems like a weird argument in a thread about responsibility.

Decided by whom? By the one party who is externalizing. Their may be able to offset the additional costs, however the ones that bear the consequences of the action in the first place (e.g. the ones who suffer from pollution or climate change) might not. Yet they still wouldn't have a say in the matter.

Are you saying the jury is somehow out on greenhouse gases? Because we definitely know it's affecting the planet. And we definitely know we need to cut back on carbon emissions. And we even know by how much. The externality is not hypothetical, we're living it, in real time, and so have a pretty damn good idea what we have to do to bring things to neutral.

Anyone claiming otherwise simply would rather not lose their profits, or is being payed/brainwashed by those people.

Government coffers belong to the people. If the carbon tax is done right the revenues go to a special use fund for addressing the externalities caused by the thing they're taxing to control... and not to the "general fund".

I'm fine not getting a share of the carbon tax if the monies are used to fight the problem.

My concern is exactly that the offsets from externalities would go to special use funds attempting very naively to rectify them.

For one thing, governments are inefficient, and externalities aren't always easy to reverse. So probably after the Department of Externality Taxation is established, either the funds raised by the tax aren't enough to compensate the people damaged, or something bureaucratic and symbolic is done that doesn't really help. After all, if there isn't really anything the department can do to address the problem, the last thing they're going to do is put themselves out of a job and return the money. They'll start wasteful moonshot projects instead.

For another, the government is now heavily incentivized to tax the Bad Thing as much as they can, both to show voters that they're Tough On Bad Thing and also to raise money. That's not what we want- we want to disincentivize externalities by exactly their true cost, and preferably return that true cost to the people damaged by it.

Finally, assuming we can't perfectly tell what the externalities cost individual people, directly giving them a return equal to average damages is efficient. It drives people who suffer the externality disproportionately away, and it attracts people who can bear the externality at minimum cost.

Your witty little strawmen with snappy names aren't helping your argument...

> Government coffers belong to the people.

Actually, quite the opposite. Government coffers belong to the government and state institutions, which is comprised of the ruling elite and the long list of apparatchiks at their service. "The people" are nothing more than a rhetorical device used to cut dissent by fooling "the people" into believing the ruling elite acts on everyone's best interests.

There's probably a block chain startup that solves the accountability problem in supply chains...

The article draws very big conclusions out of thin air, four pages of text, two pictures, and a pretentious DNS record.

On the opposite side of the spectrum of journalism was the NY Times article from earlier today, about the Arizona aquifers. Great photography and research. Awesome Web presentation, too. Cheap journalism with big pretenses is a scourge on our society.

You seem to be suggesting that more words and pretty pictures make an argument at least more compelling if not more substantive. I disagree with that idea because it has nothing to do with the facts.

Yes, I would not draw brave conclusions about globalization out of a clickbait-format article. I also make an argument about authority of judgement, based on the longevity and reputation of the media channel.

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