Without proper accounting, unprofitable businesses can thrive and would-be profitable businesses fail.
No economic system can sustain itself without proper accounting.
Perhaps, free market solutions a la Tesla are all we've got?
Tesla is still promoting the idea of the individual car, and that electric cars could replace the ICE car for each and every travel that it is used currently.
If Tesla is the free market solution, then be prepared to pay the bill for climate change.
Replacing ICE cars with electric cars looks like it's better than nothing, but it's only gonna promote the business-as-usual mindset.
Today, even with limited electric car adoption, our energy consumption is growing faster than the production of electricity from renewables is growing. That means more energy from fossil fuels worldwide. We need to slow down until solutions are found.
The best illustration in recent history are probably the attempts to insulate coal power from competition by renewables. Really makes you wonder if people don’t sometimes look in the mirror and wonder “wait, how did I end up here?”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lucas_Jr.
Pseudo-market solutions do not work. They are quickly gamed by market players. It would be just a waste of precious time.
Pseudo-market solutions in healtcare (pricing procedures with ICD and allowing market participants compete) are currently proved as inefficient. Net gain for market participants but net loss for people and goverment budgets.
So my reservation is for carbon tax as gigantic wealth transfer without real benefits to climate. I am not against urgent action on climate.
But with a tax you can only evade. The income tax still raises revenue and discourages income, even though it can be evaded and often is. I think a carbon tax would similarly raise revenue and discourage carbon, while letting us cut worse taxes like the carbon tax.
I think physicists can say they proven something but it is in principle debatable. Economy is just witchcraft in comparison - please do not give economy more credibility than it deserves.
Not even them. It only makes sense to talk about proof in formal domains such as math and logic.
Science proves nothing. It is impossible to prove that any given scientific theory will not be falsified in the future. In fact, physics was one of the main inspirations for the idea of "paradigm shift" by Thomas Kuhn in his famous work "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".
Talking about proof in science is damaging, and it conveys the wrong idea about what science actually is.
Is there an argument against carbon tax that can't be said by any other tax?
I would rather side with Naomi Klein that capitalism proved ineffective in solving problems of this scale.
It's also fairly difficult to move a coal mine to another country. Of course, people could import their carbon-intensive goods, but most proposals include tariffs on countries without comparable carbon fees. Tariffs like these are explicitly allowed by trade agreements.