Once voters realize that this would take personal cost for benefits they won't see in their lifetime, I can't see them willfully voting for any substantial reversal.
Oh, they are feeling the personal costs of climate change. It's just the political machines are trying their best to hide this fact.
Example: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-northcarolina/north-c...
I think a generation of people are so brainwashed that they can never be convinced of the harms that climate change is having directly on them.
We just had a pretty bad recession, our unemployment is still above typical levels, and we just had an unseasonably cold summer after a pretty cold winter.
It's not an issue of being brainwashed, people really do prefer having jobs and homes over climate targets to fix a problem that isn't readily apparent.
I remember an argument I got into a while back, essentially it went
"They've been saying we'll be out of oil in 10 years for 30 years."
"They'll eventually be right, unless you think we have infinite oil."
"We can worry about it when it happens then."
Being proactive is hard, but surely it'd still be less effort than being reactive here?
But even if we printed it, it would by no stretch of the imagination cause hyperinflation, just inflation. The M2 money supply -- still an incomplete measure, as there are lots of kinds of money -- in the US is 14 trillion and change, per Investopedia[1]. 12K per year * 350M people in the US = 4.2 trillion more dollars a year. Hyperinflation happens when a regime does something like double the money supply every week.
If prices stayed as is, it's hard to see why anyone would do a lot of the low paid to medium income jobs many people currently do. But those jobs would still need to be done, which would drive up wages, but where is the money for the increased wages going to come from? Well, businesses would have to charge more. That's inflation again.
These effects would still happen, but might be mitigated by easing in a policy like this over time.
I'm not convinced about taxing it to make it fiscally neutral. A wealth of evidence shows that increasing taxes on the wealthy doesn't significantly increase tax revenue. They just progressively take more and more of their wealth out of the economy off shore, or move off shore themselves, along with their businesses. Many governments across the world have tried this and it just doesn't work.
> inflation will be concentrated in staples and consumer goods
It would indeed raise prices unequally. That it would be in staples is not so clear; the US is not a place where many outside of childhood starve due to poverty. But whatever the next-most-urgent class of goods or services are -- home or car repairs, investments in health or education -- there would certainly be more demand for them. With greater demand comes initially an increase in prices. In the long term, in a competitive industry, an increase in supply that eliminates those excess profits. In oligopolistic sectors like education and healthcare, those rises in prices can somewhat persist.
In the long term, money are neutral while inequality is real. If you doubled the amount of money everyone had, prices would (eventually) double and nobody would be any better off. But if you give a fixed amount to everybody, you're muliplying the wealth of the poor by a much bigger factor than that of the rich. Prices will not adjust by enough to make the benefits to the poor outweigh the costs.
> If prices stayed as is, it's hard to see why anyone > would do a lot of the low paid to medium income jobs
Median income in the US is just shy of $60K today. US households routinely have both parents working multiple jobs. Almost nobody aspires to live on so little as $12K a year
Labor market outcomes would surely improve. A giant fraction of Americans currently don't have time to search as long as they would like between jobs; they've got to take an offer fast. The freedom to take, say, two months off to find a good match would not only help workers, it would make industry more productive.
> increasing taxes on the wealthy doesn't > significantly increase tax revenue
If that were true why would they be lobbying so hard against it?
There are, yes, a lot of loopholes in most tax codes. A rise in the tax rate that merely complicates it further will probably disappoint. But there are simple solutions. Equalizing tax rates across different kinds of income, for example, or imposing a wealth tax.
If you have society that attracts the smartest individuals for the most productive professions (which is right now anything involving information technology), your society wins.
Your society will develop new concepts first, will be the first to sell it, and the first to reap revenues from it.
Besides, it is very easy to tax the megacorps.
Tariffs on intellectual property. Or reduce tax deductions on licensing fees. Bermuda is the center of intellectual property ownership.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Historical_Marginal_...
I live in the UK. We have universal health care, a robust social care model, my kids are getting a decent free education and we have a decent benefits system. I’m proud of all of those and don’t resent a single penny I pay in taxes towards it.
But plonking big wadges of cash on everybody, funded by hammering anybody that looks even moderately successful, is a recipe for economic mayhem.
I'm not saying I, personally, favor those things over what it will cost to limit climate change. But I think society as a whole doesn't have the stomach for it, and it's not just those living on the margins.
That's a false equivalency. Jobs and homes exist in other places than Alberta and in other industries than oil extraction. Sure it will be painful to change for these Albertans but to argue that they have no choice but to vote for increasing oil production is just plain wrong.
That aside, the point I'm making is that it would still be much cheaper to relocate people from those coasts (in the immediate future) and engage in emergency preparedness than it would be to substantially mitigate our emissions output.
In the long term, that fucks us, but most voters aren't long term thinkers.
Luckily renewable energy is getting to the point where it actually saves money over fossil fuel based energy. People might be loathe to move to electric or fuel cell vehicles, but costs are coming down there too, not to mention that many governments are banning ICE vehicles anyway. So the costs of shifting may not be that bad, and people will be able to realize some cost savings.
Right now we're at a point in history where shifting to a carbon neutral economy will be uncomfortable in some ways, but not horribly painful.
But the longer we wait, the more likely it is that we'll experience a lot of pain from climate change consequences. And the climate change will destroy a tremendous amount of wealth, cause massive refugee crises, and cause massive drops in food supplies. When those things happen it's going to much harder to make the shifts to clean energy because many will just be worried about surviving disruption in the short term.
I'm going to hold off on giving these governments credit until one of these bans actually goes into effect. Even the most aggressive of the measures that has passed still has a decade in which to be weakened, delayed, or reversed.
The decline will be rapid. Why maintain a fuel supply chain when there aren't many customers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...
Mercedes just announced that they will cease development of combustion engines to focus on EV's. VW Audi Group just said that this is their last generation of combustion engines. I suspect we'll see similar announcements from other manufacturers in not too long.
We may see some countries soften their goals, but I think if some of the big automotive players commit to having products available to meet those goals, there won't be much need to relax the goals. Only things that would cause a rollback is if anti-environmental politicians get into power or governments attempting to protect domestic car companies that are late making the shift.
This is why we need to make sure that voters feel that lost income from climate gas taxes goes directly back to them through other means. It could just be income tax subsidies for low income brackets. Or I mean anything that makes sense.
Taxing climate impacting practices doesn't need to have an overall negative impact on the economy of the average voter! This needs to be made super clear.
Everything I've seen about the magnitude of change needed suggests this isn't true. And if we keep telling this story of "green growth", "only big corporations will have to sacrifice", you're going to get a ton of backlash once it becomes clear that is very much not the case.
Some things (eg flights) would get much more expensive, whereas more efficient modes of transit (trains) would get relatively cheaper, and also be subsidized by the fliers.
And the good news is that you don’t even need to wait for the majority to make the “right” vote. Apparently, it’s enough for the 3.5% of the population to take part in a sustained active resistance to bring about radical change [0]. This is also why I believe Extinction Rebellion is the last hope of humanity.
3.5/100 is for easy concessions that didn't actually require giving up capital (like race concessions, because racism is actively irrational). A rational actor today who only cares about their own interests (like the super rich) will fight tooth and nail to prevent any actual change to their consumption.
Thus probably the rich enough can protect themselves and their children from climate effects. They can sacrifice the pawns. What's a hundred million refugees if they can prop up their coal investment for another decade.
We've seen from recent economic crises that people are willing to tolerate and even vote for austerity; but since then they've noticed that all the austerity happened to people at the bottom of the economic pyramid and those at the top barely suffered at all. They've also noticed that a considerable portion of their taxes is pent on policing whose purpose is not the prevention of crime but the maintenance of the economic status quo.
Dying on a burning planet is a cost I expect to feel personally.
But you understand that isn't how the science works, right?