If we really meant it with climate policies, cruise ships and private jets would be banned immediately.
That way, you both (1) reduce the environmental impact, and (2) encourage development of newer, cleaner technologies.
In the real world, you'll probably have a lot of cover up of this sort of thing, as the companies would find it cheaper just to not report they dumped pollution into the environment than to report it and have to pay for it. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/business/carnival-cruise-...
Say that it gets 5x or 10x more expensive, there would still be flights, just far less common. And maybe then something like biokerosene becomes cost effective, driving down costs more.
Nobody wants a world where we're paying $50 to ship a package, $1000 for a short flight, or their grocery bill to double since transportation is most of the cost.
So yes. Please shift the misery.
First, most carbon taxes I have seen proposed are revenue neutral, and give the money back to those with lower incomes or provide lower carbon options to people like transit.
Though vehicle access and use has climbed in recent years in places like Southern California, it's not as though a carbon tax is an unavoidable expense, people always have other options.
A doubling of the cost of living is just so far outside of the plausible realm as to be ridiculous. A $3/gallon gas tax is way higher than any carbon tax I've seen proposed, but even if the economy didn't adapt to it and optimize a ton, that's not enough for a doubling of the cost of living.
The key is that we must change behavior, and change our carbon use. It's not enough to say "if we do this bad it will hurt this small group of people," we must say that and show how to mitigate that harm or show that it's greater harm than our current course of action. The status quo is not justified as a default option.
People would scream, but the point is that WE'RE ALREADY PAYING $1-$3 a gallon for our CO2. It's just that it's not the driver that's paying, it's people in areas vulnerable to climate change and future generations.
I mean losing Florida outright would cost $1 trillion annually so you got me there. As long as we keep half of Florida we're probably good though.
Let that sink in. $3/gallon is about the same as losing the entirety of Ohio. There's a reason we fight wars over this stuff. I desperately want to be better to our environment but these kinds of 'simple solutions' can't possibly work in isolation. Reducing consumption sounds nice until you remember all the people whose lives depend on that consumption to live.
That $500 billion would be spent on something (consumer rebate, carbon sequestration, debt repayment, something). And government spending has second order effects too, estimated at about 1.75x for direct consumer rebates, less for anything else. So it's possible that the carbon tax would have a net positive on the economy.
Even if it isn't a net positive by itself, the net effect will be a LOT less than $500B.
The problem we're facing is that there's no clear consensus on what that cost is.
Coincidentally the same company...
Why?
Obviously you could make the same argument about the environment ("you're killing nature without its consent") but as long as we (the human civilisation) cannot live in a zero-impact manner, it shouldn't be nobody else's choice on how I polute the environment (i.e. as long as you drive a car, I can fly in a private jet, provided that environmental costs are accounted for proportionally)
You could add higher port fees, but how is that encouraging better technology? If anything it will just encourage ships/cruise lines to dock nearby and ship goods/people over land/air.
Taxes are fine if a business cannot float between countries. In this case the business can literally float between countries, and they'll avoid the taxes.
No, you just need to drop the idea of free trade. Big economies (in particular, the US and EU) are big enough to enforce their standards globally. Serving EU customers? Comply with GDPR. Want to do business in USD? Comply with US banking regulations. Same could be done for shipping (and, I wish, tax avoidance & other environmental standards).
> We just need to take the externalities [...] and tax [...] accordingly.
Not everything can be made to "play-nice" with free-markets.
I'm not saying we shouldn't consider and focus on better efficiency and other technology in the aviation sector, but there are lower hanging fruits. It would be much more viable in the short term to fractionally decrease, say, a fraction of industrial emissions equivalent to all of aviation emissions. Or improve carbon sequestration technology.
The main stat on this article is dumb because cars don't really emit sulphur oxide, so obviously something that emits some will be a huge multiplier.
EDIT: This is almost certainly wrong, as other comments have pointed out to me. Not deleting it for posterity's sake.
In terms of CO2: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/739287/Flying-three-times...
Cruise ships, as it happens, are horrible on both measures.
In short, that spending a few hours on a thin metal aerodynamic cigar is more energy effective than a week spent on a bulky floating city doesn’t surprise me.
Boeing 747-400: 91 passenger-miles per gallon
Of course passenger aircraft are tightly packed and cruise ships have large cabins, swimming pools, etc.
Both numbers from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport
Cruise ships are almost certainly
cleaner than commercial air travel
as a whole.
[1] https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/ask-mr-green/which-better-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2006/dec/20/cruises.green
> However, in the cases of high-altitude airliners which frequently fly near or in the stratosphere, non-CO2 altitude-sensitive effects may increase the total impact on anthropogenic (human-made) climate change significantly.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviati...