If someone asked me if I wanted to contribute to a new freeway in my city that I'm not going to use directly, no I don't, the marginal benefit to me is too slight. But I appreciate having sophisticated infrastructure, and when I see infrastructure spending on the budget, I'm more or less content with it.
By the same token I don't for example pay for trees to be planted for every ton of CO2 I generate, but I'm happy for my taxes to go towards addressing the issue. If someone asked me if I'd like a tax break on the condition that it came out of that line-item, I wouldn't.
I found out about him and his uplifting work through an appearance on the podcast Manifold [1]. But you can also learn about his research directly through ASU [2, 3].
Personally, it made me feel like the problem was far more tractable than I previously intuited.
[1] https://manifoldlearning.com/episode-040/ [2] https://asunow.asu.edu/20190429-solutions-lackner-carbon-cap... [3] https://cnce.engineering.asu.edu/
I don’t want gas; I want some means to propel my car from A to B. I’ll choose the most economically practical option, gas being the currently most available one. I live in Florida, so the “underwater in 50 years” meme hits very close to my home: about 3km away, to be precise. Lots of people will see the incentive to use less gas, or to pay for carbon sequestration in the absence of a non-gas option.
Nobody _wants_ to pay for trash removal or a sewage system either, because they don't get anything back immediately—maybe a slightly less smelly neighbourhood in a few weeks. The only difference with CO₂ is scale.
Sunk is more accurate than free, though.
The average of (4, 5, 5, 6) is 5. The average of (1, 2, 9, 9) is 5.25.
Laws and treaties ended leaded gas, atmospheric nuclear testing, and markets for several industrial chemicals with global impacts. Future archeologists will be able to date these legal constructs by the concentration of these chemicals, or radioisotopes, and their effects, in layers of rock and soil.
Depends on whether you assume the background property arrangements are valid. We call them a thief because we call this gasoline owned by this group of people we call a company.
Some other group of people might call everyone who buys gasoline thieves since they profit off of the negative externality they leverage on the rest of society.
It's all a matter of what you view as neutral and objective and what you view as a violation of others rights.
I think carbon emitters should be the ones paying. Otherwise you privatize the profits and socialize the cleanup expenses.
Isn't that exactly what the parent comment proposed?
>Is it a bad thing to force people who use a commodity to pay for its cleanup?
My impression is an economist would tell you that it theoretically doesn't matter that much if you tax the consumer or the producer. It's like US payroll taxes - does it make a difference how the tax is split between employer and employee? The real question is who is forced to absorb the cost, and theoretically that isn't determined by who pays from an accounting perspective - it's a red herring.
Often people insist without evidence that someone who will pay a tax can or cannot pass it through, whichever is convenient to argue against it, when the real answer is probably "it's complicated" and the entity taxed is not in control.
I think this is the Wikipedia page describing the phenomenon I'm fumbling at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence
"The theory of tax incidence has a number of practical results. For example, United States Social Security payroll taxes are paid half by the employee and half by the employer. However, some economists think that the worker bears almost the entire burden of the tax because the employer passes the tax on in the form of lower wages. The tax incidence is thus said to fall on the employee.[2] However, it could equally well be argued that in some cases the incidence of the tax falls on the employer. This is because both the price elasticity of demand and price elasticity of supply effect upon whom the incidence of the tax falls"
I'm thinking this also is related to the recent political arguments over who pays US tariffs.
Using gas is like eating dessert first. This is just forcing vegetables as part of the equation.
There will be a carbon tax because people are too short-sighted in identifying long-term impact because - "It doesn't hurt me."
It does...you are just too dense to notice.
To your point, using gas causes externalities. We know how to address externalities broadly. But the political will is lacking due to anti science proponents.
For example: carbon-captured or carbon-neutral fuels have a tax advantage (or even subsidies).
The infrastructure around fossil fuels is big, if you can have a carbon-compensated equivalent to that it could be viable.