Hacker News Reader

Comment by haram_masala | Hacker News Reader

Could a carbon tax also be assessed against capital gains that benefit from carbon emission? That might address the inherent inequality you mention.

View on HN

I'm unsure how you would go about doing that. You would somehow have to be able to assess the carbon emissions of every company. This gets quite difficult, because you have to start answering questions such as "do we count the carbon emissions of the individual employees?" It might seem like a silly question, but this could have an impact on which types of businesses people invest in.

It would probably just be easier to have a general carbon tax that gets paid back to people. Then separately you could have a UBI paid for by capital gains taxes or something along those lines.

But somebody else probably knows more about this.

Do they not already have to report emissions?

I work for a fintech startup. I'd be very surprised if we had to report emissions. Yet, we are definitely a method for the rich to get richer through investments. And we currently benefit from a particular kind of carbon footprint - somewhat indirectly.

No but they may have to declare that they have nothing to declare or those who do need certain kinds of operatimg licences that your company doesn't. Obviously they know who's running refineries, paper mills and things like that.

> You would somehow have to be able to assess the carbon emissions of every company

And then map that to every stock, bond, loan and asset.

Economists distinguish between three scopes of emissions https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/06/20/how-much-can-f...

It gets complicated as direct taxation just encourages moving the dirtiest link in the supply chain offshore.

E.g. manufacture tire in the US and be subject to a high emissions tax, manufacture them abroad and then import them into US - and you're golden.

Could you not solve that issue with tariffs?

A carbon tax is best levied at the point of extraction. Businesses that currently benefit from emitting a lot will automatically reduce in value.

*automatically move abroad to complacent countries where emission can be whatever you want them to be

Why would they? If they export their goods they get the tax back and if they wanted to import after moving to a different country they'd have to pay at the border.

and how much would they pay at the border?

The best estimate as to how much carbon the product released times the price of carbon of course. I'd guess the estimates would be on the high side to encourage domestic production.

> complacent countries where emission can be whatever you want them to be

and whom you gonna trust for measuring/estimate the carbon produced in the complacent country?

"yes sir we have all these kind of filters and capture schemes"

preemptive reply to "but we're going to check and fine them": Panama Papers happened and nothing was done about them.

You have domestic experts doing the estimation.

oh I bet the WTO would love that, unilateral levies from the country of destination based on capricious bureaucracy

People who know about such things generally think that the WTO would not be a problem. For example: https://www.climateadvisers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/2...

You of course need to ensure that any export rebates and import taxes are fair.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com