A general CO2 tax wouldn’t be hard to implement if we were a dictatorship.
You'd have a hard time getting a CO2 tax passed because it would just end up going into the general fund and get spent on pet projects, not on anything that really addressed CO2 emissions, or helped with the cost of alternative fuels or vehicles.
A carbon tax would work if you burned the money. Bonus points if you captured the CO2 from the fire :)
A carbon tax serves to connect our intuition to our logic. We logically know that, somehow, the sum of all our disparate little actions is responsible for global warming. But the feedback loop is notoriously long, and complex. And humans are no-to-ri-ous-ly bad at properly valuing that. We couldn't do it to save our lives, or that of our species.
Furthermore, it helps break free from the tragedy of the commons, where every independent agent makes a game theoretically optimal move, to the detriment of the global system. No amount of proselytising or appealing to humane sensibilities, no amount of ecological lucidity or sudden flashes of intuitive insight into that awful feedback loop, would ever solve that problem.
No weapon works better against overfishing than quotas. Not necessarily a tax, but leveraging the market similarly.
No weapon works better against carbon emissions than a carbon tax.
Pigovian taxes are powerful weapons in a market oriented society. Very, very powerful. This is why vested interests will do absolutely anything to prevent them.
Doing something useful with the money is just a tiny cherry on top of large cake of success.
This is very under appreciated. A lot of potential taxes aren't actually collected because people alter behavior to avoid them. For a carbon tax that's the point.
I'll also say the behavior you want to alter is not 'buying carbon based fuels'. The behavior you want to stop is people buying gasoline powered cars and natural gas fired furnaces. Which means what you want is a excise tax on those things not the fuel itself. Because when someone buys a gas powered car they commit then and there to emit 100 tons of CO2. So make the pain point then and there, not in the nebulous future.
Netherlands is now a laggard in sustainable energy in the EU. I guess we have 'pro-business' liberal-democratic ruling party (VVD) and greenwashing-only companies such as Shell to thank for that. They prefer 'lobbycracy' above democracy.
Over a period of some years this easily adds up to what other countries such as the US have been paying out in EV subsidies, add to that that fossil fuels are much more expensive than say the US and it's a very significant subsidy.
As for the standard of living differences, are those numbers similar to the energy-per-capita differences between the same countries ?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/mar/23/city-dwe...
Of course, you _can_ have a low carbon footprint in the country, but it's really hard, because those places are hostile to cycling and walking.
A big incentive for electric cars comes from cities, though: in Amsterdam, if you get an electric car, you get an electric charging spot in front of your house, which is effectively a private parking spot if you're the only one with an electric car. With the constant shortage of parking spots, this is huge.
The subsidy mostly helped people get a Tesla Model S as a company car. And it is still subsidized for about 17% of 50k, which is 8000 euro a year. While the Tesla Model S is more environmentally friendly than a similar sized gasoline car, buying of smaller electric cars (like the volkswagen e-golf, tesla model 3, etc) should be encouraged more. I don't think it was a bad idea to cap the subsidy at 50 000 euro.
Then they had the gall to turn around and promote the fact that Ontario has dropped its CO2 emissions by 25% in the last 10 years. All due to the actions of the previous government that they railed against with "lock her up" type chants.
Problem with the French protests is that the fuel tax raise didn't take care of poor-ish people.
Most "eco" politics doesn't care about these people either - no matter the country - and that's the reason why Trump and other right-wingers can hate so successfully against anything environmentally-friendly.
It's not a left vs right thing. It's a the people calling the shots are out of touch with what the day to day problems of the masses are thing.
It very much is. Take a look at ANY right-wing political party and look who gets screwed over: always the lowest class people first. Women, PoC, migrants, poor persons.
The right-wing strategy is to distract the masses with "it's the fault of the foreigners/the Muslims/Deep State/Swamp" while at the same time enacting policies that benefit only the ultra rich.
That creates a tax incentive as well as a new industry to fix the problem. Grow slowly so not to immediately cripple the industry, but long before the tax reaches 100% of the cost, will most people have switched to something cleaner.
But, without international cooperation, fly routes could become distorted because of kerosine tax effects.
It does not require an authoritarian central leadership.
But it does require stopping and rolling back the capture of political bodies and the public sphere generally by private interests.
If gas, energy, or home heating prices double, whoever's in power is going to be voted out. It's not the capture of political bodies that drives that--it's normal people. It'll take a suspension of democracy or a long time to make a measurable impact on climate change.
(And since emissions are not distributed linearly, the losers from a cost-neutral carbon-tax with per-capita-dividend will always be a minority.)
From what I'm being told, fundamental changes need to occur in our consumption to have a measurable impact on climate change. That won't happen with normal people continuing to consume at the same rates they have.
Could a carbon tax be designed such that normal people are effectively reimbursed and heavy emitters pay more? Yes. But you're not going to measurably impact climate change without somehow incentivizing people to use less. At some point, people need to use less, and when you force them to (through taxes or restrictions), it won't be popular politically.
More clearly stated, my point is that what's really needed is people to adjust their consumption downward dramatically, but the taxes necessary to cause that will be politically infeasible.
And you don't think the difference in prices has anything to do with that?
Looking up the statistics on miles driven, the gap isn't as big as I expected, though, so I'm probably not giving the tax as much credit as it deserves.
You could double the price of gas in the US and driving would not change much, because people would have no other way to get to work and get their kids to school. The most you could hope for is that people would buy more efficient cars.
It's ideas like this why Americans are heavily armed. Nobody can explain how a "co2 tax" would actually do good, yet you implicitly advocate killing people to enact it.
Not that hard to explain.