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Comment by andrepd | Hacker News Reader

People do get that, but waiting for people to spontaneously start doing the right thing is just not a very good strategy.

That's why we need a carbon tax. To force people to.

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As an economist I fully agree. It's not the solution but the measure that helps consumers in ranking all possible solutions. Why is flying without kerosine tax? Why do we spend a few k€ on electric car subsidies per MT less emitted. A tax would make things like this transparant. All we need is some party with the clout of the EU or US to get this thing going. There is no opting out trading with us and no opting out for local citizens. With 1/4th (?) Of global GDP on board it would be the transformative step in starting towards drawdown. All other measures are doomed to fail without it. You can't invest in anything CO2 related when you can't capture the gains. Make no mistakes: CO2 accounting and taxing will be a massive invitation for corruption, gaming and bad actors. But we don't have another option except heavy handed top down regulation.

> CO2 accounting and taxing will be a massive invitation for corruption, gaming and bad actors

That's the problem already. We've had a CO2 price for a long time - but it's meaninglessly low. I can only presume because of lobbying from those with vested interests.

CO2 fraud has been uncovered in the EU VAT zone[0] 1.6 billion euros skimmed by a dozen people in France. Up to 10 billion for the EU as a whole.

Unfortunately I could only find sources in french or hebrew but the amounts amassed by this operation is staggering.

[0]https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraude_%C3%A0_la_TVA_sur_les...

Can't we make fines high and give anyone that reports fraud a cut of penalty?

There's a similar concept to a Pigovian tax for fines, I think of it as a "Pigovian fine", which is the price at which the likelihood of getting caught times the fine exceeds the cost to pay the tax directly.

So if you have a 1% chance of getting caught, the fine needs to be 101x the tax.

This is why so many e.g. banking and consumer protection fines fail to achieve their goal - the cost of adhering is more than the probability of getting caught times the fine, so it's economically rational to not pay.

Not just simple fraud, but a major hurdle is how to regulate CO2 necessary for producing consumer energy without creating a regressive tax structure. Once CO2 is converted to electricity on the grid, it's fungible and impossible to sort out luxury vs necessity.

Imho, government trying to sin-tax away CO2 is result of our failure to invest in technology solutions.

Not so hard. It's fine if any individual tax is regressive, as long is counterbalanced by UBI or other forms of per-capita welfare support. You don't need to measure precisely, as long as you get rough estimates that people pay $Y in various sin-taxes but get $X>$Y in general welfare benefits.

I absolutely disagree. Inserting the government into the average citizen's balance sheet can and will be corrupted.

People are busy and stressed and don't have time to think about stuff like that. That is why the government, aka society, have to make those calls and enforce them. People need guidance to make the right decisions in an already complicated world. If we can't get people to eat right, value science, save an emergency fund, or so many things why do we keep acting surprised when they don't even know what global warming is.

And, people don't usually put themselves at an economic disadvantage.

If their neighbors are buying cheap goods, they probably will too.

I disagree, with advertising and brand loyalty, often people spend more than they need to on equivalent goods.

Sure, if it's a marginal cost increase or if you're wealthy.

But middle-income families typically aren't going to spend 25-50% more on a comparable product to save on CO2.

There was a big push decades ago to buy American, but it largely failed because for the majority of people living paycheck to paycheck, spending 25-50% more to have an American flag sticker on your purchase wasn't worth it.

Also because there is 0 accountability that the flag sticker is honest. Sometimes the only part that's "made in USA" is the effort of applying the sticker.

My partner and I are a middle income family (though comfortable because we live cheap) and we buy based on a bunch of factors including brand loyalty and environment policy (as much as you can find out without it turning into a full time job).

Regulations across borders are ineffective, usually useless... and good luck promoting conscientious consumerism.

We need tariffs on imports from polluting countries.

We don’t just need a carbon tax. We need the public to support it unlike the French public.

So we need to redistribute the carbon tax as UBI. So people say “more carbon tax please!” Climate Justice. Contact Andrew Yang who is running for President and tell him his UBI needs to be funded with a carbon tax!

I think if you had a properly planned tax so you could say this is fair and will fix or at least significantly reduce the risk from global warming then people would be ok with it. The present ineffectual stuff doesn't really achieve much.

You are too naive to think that, in my opinion. It is also unnecessary to rely on this dream about human nature when we can just do the UBI thing which is strictly MORE incentive. Not to mention that it lets us introduce UBI’

UBI just makes landlords richer. Why not have the country simply pick up the carbon tax for individuals?

What does that even mean? Go into depth on both of your points.

If 10 families are in price competition for 9 houses* the price will be $1 more than the poorest family can afford. Which will probably leave the second-poorest family struggling.

If (in your justified pity for the poorest and second-poorest) you give everyone a free $1000, the equilibrium price will simply rise by $1000 leaving the same families struggling and homeless.

This is the model armchair economists use to explain reports that Bay Area employees paid 4x the national median household income can struggle to find housing.

Of course, if you instead think of Detroit, where many properties are abandoned and some change hands for as little as $500, the model is far less applicable.

*Assuming a simple model of a closed system where all houses are identical, there are no houses outside the system, no possibility of building new houses, and families are as densely packed as possible.

Bat Area employees pay so much because of gentrification, inequality and concentration of wealth.

A UBI is simply a progressive tax to counteract the usual economic forces that let the richer get richer: they can afford bigger switching costs, they can afford to take more risks, they have amassed more patents and technology like AI, loyal engineers and so on.

UBI can be adjusted to simply redistribute the money in the system back so everyone has a floor, and can also afford to take risks without worrying about access to the expectations and necessities of modern life.

Sure inflation happens anyway. Everyone already eats. Giving everyone food stamps isn’t gonna change that.

This is an amazig article that discusses that.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidie...

I don't think China would consent to being taxed like that.

They don't have to consent. That's the whole point of tariffs. They can be imposed unilaterally (As we have recently seen with the US - China shoving contest. Which, of course, had nothing to do with the environment, or carbon emissions, and everything to do with political optics.)

The US can impose tariffs on trade with the US.

If they wanted to impose it on China's oil trade with Saudi or Russia, it would have to be done militarily.

And that still leaves the question how to impose a carbon tax on China's domestic coal and oil.

The purpose of carbon tarrifs is not to punish other countries.

The purpose of carbon tarrifs is to make foreign dirty-energy-intensive products less competitive, compared to less dirty-energy-intensive ones.

Because we already have a way of making domestic dirty-energy-intensive products less competitive. It works great. It's called a domestic carbon tax.

They remove the immediate complaint of "If we impose a local carbon tax on energy, foreign imports will outcompete us, because they don't have to pay it."

OP talked about a carbon tax, as am I.

You're talking about "carbon tarrifs", which I've never heard of, and don't know what they are.

A carbon tariff is a carbon tax, but on external goods, that come from countries which don't have carbon taxes of their own.

A tariff is generally across the board though, by product type. If one company starts being more "green" than the others in the country of origin, it doesn't generally get hit less by tariffs.

It can be implemented on a per-company basis, just as sanctions often are.

If the West stops trading with China then they will invade Taiwan and Okinawa and also supply modern weapon systems to North Korea.

This is Tom Clancy fairy-tale nonsense. China wants a nuclear-free Korea, for the same reason that the United States wants a nuclear-free Mexico and Canada. Nuclear super-powers aren't keen on letting their neighboring satellite states limit their foreign policy, by arming them.

A carbon tax is not 'stopping trade'. It's an increase to the price of goods that are energy-intensive to manufacture, or ship.

The Chinese aren't going to allow any sort of tariffs that would threaten their rapid industrialization without serious saber-rattling.

They'll do that regardless when the time is right.

This is pure speculation. Meanwhile, our government is actively invading and occupying how many countries?

A carbon tax will disproportionately hurt people who did not cause this problem. We should be nationalizing our energy industries.

Always another regressive tax needed as the only way to solve a problem. There are other options that don't so egregiously favor the ones with money.

Carbon taxes can be offset with a per-person tax credit. This makes it revenue neutral while ensuring that big consumers pay more taxes. They do it in British Columbia already [1]

1. https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/environment/climate-chang...

You make it revenue neutral – look up fee and dividend, the method favoured by most economists. The bottom ~2/3rd of households would, on average, get more money back than the tax would cost them.

> The bottom ~2/3rd of households would, on average, get more money back than the tax would cost them.

Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding: 2/3rds of households would first have to pay up, and then they'll get more money back than they paid in? If that's true, it sounds like it would be instituting needless added complexity, with a layer added for politicians and bureaucrats to take a cut before giving it back.

The value add of the layer in complexity is that the costs of some goods but not others would go up. This would make buying and investing in renewables more favorable economically.

So the value add is to artificially add a cost to one form of energy production to make it cost more than another form? That does not sound like a "value add", but rather a simple "cost add," with government agents making the demands and meting out financial (and eventually, physical) punishment for non-compliance.

And we really want to add complexity and inconvenience to 2/3rds of households just so they can get their money back?

It's called a pigovian tax, and it's widely considered the most efficient way to deal with these kinds of negative externalities.

For most lower income households, they would actually be receiving a net increase in their income, since they emit less than the mean carbon output.

Burning fossil fuels has a real cost to everyone which is not priced appropriately by the free market (this is a well known economic effect known as a negative externality). This tax corrects for the artificially low costs.

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