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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem with such a tax is that all countries would have to implement it. When the US is accounting for about 15% of global carbon emissions we can’t solve the problem just by reducing our own carbon emission.

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What?

That doesn't make sense.

Not all countries need to do it. Just most.

In in actual fact, the sooner leader countries like the USA do it the sooner other countries get their act together.

Don't act like this is all or nothing. It's not.

Furthermore, the sooner the USA does it the sooner technologies improve, the sooner other smaller countries are suddenly enabled by said technologies.

That aside whole "we all need to do it" is utter nonsense. No, you don't. Other countries taking advantage of you is still not a socially moral excuse. Mind yourself first thanks.

The US led the world in emission reductions in 2018, meanwhile the EU, Canada, India, and China increased their production significantly. Yet the US gets slammed by the global community

https://imgur.com/a/sNWFP3k

Growing is easy when you start from zero, and reducing is easy when you can easily move your production elsewhere. BP statistical review probably have their numbers right, I'm more concern about the message they want to spread. (I do not say that EU/China should be able to increase their emissions, just that the US is not decreasing its consumption therefore it is impossible to decrease emission)

Because the US is so high absolutely. Should it get an award just because natural gas got cheaper than coal?

Yes it should. It made it happen because instead of having endless meetings and brainstorming sessions in Lesbos or Johannesburg, the heartless ignoramuses of Texas figured out how to drill for clean energy. What really did the brainstormes accomplish considering the chart presented?

You think fracking is clean?

You think the "brainstorming sessions" accomplished nothing because of cherry picked single year data on Imgur?

Yikes.

Absolutely not.

One useful rhetorical side effect is breaking the narrative linking GDP with petrol consumption. Opening people's mind's to the possibility that conservation and switching to renewable won't crater the economy.

Perceptions matter.

The USA with 4% of the world's population is responsible for over a third of the greenhouse gases unnaturally released.

You better believe the global community will slam the USA for their emissions.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/01/climate/us-bi...

Other countries have their issues and NOBODY is defending them here. So I'm not sure what you're getting at with the rest of that statement.

There's no single solution and there will always be a reason not to do something.

Border adjustments are a well understood policy solution to this issue. Imports from polluting countries are taxed appropriately, and exports to those countries subsidized. From the perspective of anyone inside the nation with the border adjustment, it’s as though the whole world implemented the carbon tax.

That only works if taxing countries ahave a way to estimate should-be-taxable events in other countries.

How do you know of Chieng-Shen's widgets are from polluting factories but Hong Wan's aren't?

Carbon taxes generally don’t need to be huge to achieve their goals, so anyone without proof they’re clean can be taxed as though they’re filthy.

15% is massive. We're discussing the same tax in my country and we're like 0.01%.

the US is pretty big as a whole, compared the EU the difference is as extreme. Also, never allow for the discussion to go by per capita as the seriously distorts the numbers in countries where a great deal of the population does not participate

> The biggest problem with such a tax is that all countries would have to implement it. When the US is accounting for about 15% of global carbon emissions

Hypothetically provinces/countries could be taxed relative to their emissions (albeit this would take some fantasy-like widely agreed upon criteria).

The US has a little over 4% of the world population, yet it's responsible for 15% of carbon emissions [1]. Even if the US is the only country to implement it, it would already make a huge difference.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

So USA could breed a huge population of impovershed underclass to bring average emissions down.

Trade sanctions are the usual mechanism to influence other governments. I don’t see why this situation would be any different.

Or in a more civil way, since it seems we have entered the era of tariffs wars, perhaps countries with carbon taxes should be slapping tariffs on imports from countries with none. Tie the tariff to some metric derived from a country's estimated CO2 emissions, subtracting some amount for % land mass in forests, reforestation efforts, carbon tax rates, deployment of renewables, etc.

It would have negative economic consequences in the short term, I'm sure. But put in place by large importers it would directly motivate emission offenders to not play the game of lowest-common-denominator.

Where are you getting your statistics from?

According to a quick Google search, https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/sc..., China is the highest emitter, followed by the US, which emits half as much CO2, and India emits half again as much as the US.

Ok, so how about implementing the tax only to the extent required to get per capita emissions down to the global mean?

True, but leading by example would be a good start.

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