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Comment by zajio1am | Hacker News Reader

I agree that we need a carbon tax. IMHO the good way to get wider support for it is to make it revenue-neutral - collected money could be distributed equally as income tax credit (or some other way).

In this way carbon tax would increas marginal costs of using carbon-intensive products, but does not increase overall taxation.

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I would rather like a carbon market where every person gets the same amount of emissions per year and can then sell this towards manufacturers using fossil carbon. This gets the notion of "the air we breath belongs to all of us" way better than shoveling even more money to the government

The problem with that is there are a lot of transaction costs to individuals selling their personal emissions.

Like the comment one higher up mentioned, one way to get around that and do effectively the same thing would be to split the revenue among citizens. This is what a bunch of economists have called for doing: https://www.econstatement.org/

Trudeau has done this in Canada. I, like you, thought it would be a brilliant way to get around the traditional conservative opposition to taxes, but surprisingly - they still opposed it, and provincial conservatives have challenged it in the courts.

That said, revenue neutrality probably has increased the tax's popularity. Polls show a massive increase in approval when people are informed of this return of money.

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