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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

If we tax “carbon,” are you going to lower my income taxes? I’ll support a carbon tax when you support eliminating capital gains and income taxes. Unless cutting taxes and spending is a part of this carbon tax plan, I will never support it. I already give over 50% of my money to governments, I’m not about to support even more.

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Would you give up more to ensure your children don’t grow up in a dystopian nightmare? What if the necessary amount is 60% of your income? 90%? What if our only hope is to go back to a 18C standard of living? Unfortunately the planet doesn’t care if you have enough cash to pay rent once you account for your environmental externalities.

Most people would gladly give up their income to ensure their children don’t grow up in a dystopian nightmare. The issue is that not everyone agrees on the way how exactly that money should be spent, and how nightmarish the future looks.

What if we can learn how to control climate and have ice free arctic, green sahara and 21st century standard of living?

While we need a way to penalize air polution (not just co2!), implementing that simply as 'extra money that government can spend on war' is not ideal.

> Most people would gladly give up their income to ensure their children don’t grow up in a dystopian nightmare.

People who start off by making an "I'm taxed too much" argument might do this for their own children, but the whole point is that they're not willing to spend a single dollar to save someone else's children.

Considering Medicare and social security, that doesn't seem to be the case. The older folks basically said: our children can pay that. And kicked the can down the road because it won't be their problem.

That never works. You part of your money today and down the line any random reason become an emergency forcing all your taxes into sustaining this or that politicized program which never does anything but help greasing the wheel of the political machine.

So you both lose your money today and you don't do your children future any better.

Taxation is the wrong answer, taxation works to resolve at most the issues of today, never the issues of tomorrow

As of today the best one can do is ethical spending and information campaigns and hope enough people vote with their wallet for sustainable companies.

We are all on the same planet and we'll all suffer as temperatures rise.

Let's agree that a carbon tax should be revenue neutral (via a dividend), and not fund either a progressive or conservative agenda. The purpose of the tax is to internalize CO2 externalities. Other issues can be hashed out on their merits.

Agreed. Carbon pricing works via substitution effects: carbon-intensive goods become relatively more expensive so people substitute towards less carbon-intensive goods, all other things equal. Tax revenue hypothecation hardly ever makes sense anyway, as tax revenue is fungible.

How would that dividend work?

You avoid paying more by buying products and services that emit less carbon and therefore are less taxed. This economic incentive is how the tax helps curb carbon emissions (and hopefully other forms of pollution also, why stop at carbon when the world is drowning in single-use plastic for example).

Hence the dividend part. You fair share of the tax should be returned to you.

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