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I think the most important benefit of co2 tax would be we would be much more conscious about emissions the same it happened to garbage couple decades ago. This is prerequisite for business to include it as a real factor in optimizations. And if you are one of those that do not care you would still have to pay for cleaning after your.self

> I think the most important benefit of co2 tax would be we would be much more conscious about emissions

I think discussions could get more constructive if proponents of CO2 tax did get conscious of the epycal change they are talking about.

Same issue as protecting environment from garbage and toxic substances or replacing our use of oil and gas with renewables. It costs huge, nobody had incentive starting it, but it is worth it.

The tax would have to be slowly introduced over period of many years. It is necessary for economy and various industries to adjust. New industry of scrubbing co2 needs funds and time to develop.

> get conscious of the epycal change

What does epycal mean? (Or what word did you mean?) Google failed me.

Butchered "ethical"?

s/epycal/epic

> Industries like steel and other high energy users is particular allergic to variance in power availability and price

Kind of. Actually many high energy users like steel industry are often the primary clients of demand-response agreements with their suppliers. If it's in the contract and helps offset their energy costs then some variance isn't necessarily bad for their business.

>There is so many issues to solve in order to have a carbon tax. Just to pick a few examples:

All of your examples look like one issue to me, which is people unwilling to change their lifestyle and sacrifice their luxuries.

The only way out of this mess is to use less resources, which means consume less, travel less, have fewer children, etc. Carbon tax or dictatorial orders, the root of the problem is people don’t want to consume less, and our children and their children will pay the price due to us not wanting to pay it now.

Of course no one wants to pay it now. To me, that’s an argument for forcing the payment (via taxation) rather than wishing really hard that people will change.

Getting people to accept increased food prices, higher cost of imported goods and higher taxes in order to focus on infrastructure is complex. To make a comparison, universal healthcare is a rather minor governmental change.

To put down some numbers, Americans spend just 6.4% of their household income on food. Around 1950 they spent about 20%. It not that Americans eat one fifth as much as they used to (if anything the claim is that people eat more today), so the life style change is both that people need to pay more and eat less.

Similar if we talk about railway budget, the US government spend today about 0.00156% in proportion to the budget of 1950. It basically stopped investing into the railway infrastructure. Naturally the proportion of the population (and industry) that use the railway system has also gone down, through not as extreme as the budget.

The root of the problem is that people don't want to pay more to get less, and then also consume less at the same time. They also don't want to pay more taxes in order to invest heavily in infrastructure that take half a century before people see the benefits.

> Similar if we talk about railway budget, the US government spend today about 0.00156% in proportion to the budget of 1950.

Confirm that it's 1/640th of the 1950 budget?! That seems insane. (Is it perhaps 1/6.4 [0.156% or 0.00156x] instead?)

The Federal Railroad Administration alone has a budget over $1.5BB. Does that mean we were spending the equivalent of almost a trillion of today's dollars a year (~25% of receipts) on rail in 1950? That seems several orders of magnitude wrong.

Yes, a 1000x error there :).

The numbers I read was that since 1950 the railway infrastructure budget has only increased by 30%. US budget in 1950 was around 70 billions, while 2018 it is 7 trillions. (https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/fed_spending_1950USbn)

The proportional funding should thus have went down by basically the same amount as the government spending went up. I might very well be wrong, and The Federal Railroad Administration was created in 1966 so I am not sure exactly which part of the government paid for railway before that point, and the 30% claim could of course be wrong. Department of Transportation has had a increase in funding by about 10x from 1970 to 2008, but I could not find exact numbers for the Federal Railroad Administration.

> people unwilling to change their lifestyle and sacrifice their luxuries.

I agree with you this is a very important issue. But it's far too easy to underestimate the "stubborness" of people to keep living fine!

You make it sound like these unsolved, expensive, or insurmountable issues.

Literally all of these have cheap, trivial fixes that would reopen markets closed by the perverse subsidization we have now.

> People do not want their electric bill to jump ten (or more) folds

Power companies already offer budget billing to deal with the seasonal variation. It's trivial to extend this to some level of weather prediction. In fact there's already source variation taken into account. Even if the increased volatility causes the order of magnitude price changes, there is already a market for electric price smoothing through batteries and energy storage. Just look what Tesla did for this exact issue in Australia.

>Food prices would go up as rural living is directly impacted by carbon taxes.

I'm not sure how you're figuring this. If anything, food prices would decrease because we'd find more efficient local distribution techniques. Since rural areas is where the foo dis grown, that's where it would be the cheapest. In fact we not only already have more local distribution channels - we have federal infrastructure around it: https://www.ams.usda.gov/local-food-directories/farmersmarke.... Moreover, there's already a growing free market for this: https://fortune.com/2015/08/21/local-food-movement-business/.

> increased costs to personal transportation means a population that relies more on mass transit systems. That mean in order to keep people from moving to cities we need a significant investment into building out the railway system

I'm not following this argument. Increased reliance on mass transit would overall make everything cheaper, AVOIDing massive investments in both railroads and increased highway capacity.

I also don't follow your last point. Tariffs don't require treaties and are probably the best place to solve this in the beginning. As more nations enact their own carbon tariffs, we could begin to have a real discussion on international agreements.

These are sound quite manageable relative to the economic catastrophe of doing nothing.