What if everyone had an air-mile allowance?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I’ve lived in north western Europe my entire life, and enjoy travelling by train/ferry and explore neighbouring countries - there is more than enough to see for a life time. It is astonishing to me how many people find it neccessary to fly to the other side of the globe to feel like they are on vacation (or more likely.. for vanity.)
The taxation level should be somewhat dynamic and simply rise or fall to discourage flying as much as is needed to remain below a predetermined yearly ceiling of Revenue Passenger Miles (RPM).
On the bright side: in recent years train travel in Europe has been getting better, with a renewed interest in sleeper trains. I just hope this whole Covid-mess doesn't stop these developments completely.
These marketplace schemes never work in reality. except for creating a bunch of marketplace middleman saas that makes money.
First, with a fixed quota, the value of a credit is bid up by people wanting to fly, not dissimilar to the Norwegian butter crisis where a stick of butter cost upward of €40.
Second, with a credit transfer system, people selling their credits receive a "negative" tax, while people buying credits pay a positive tax.
This system ensures everyone still has access to a basic level of air travel at today's prices, but is also super-linearly incentivize to travel less.
A linear (fixed) tax on travel will just price out the lowest class, and a linear tax means nothing to those on top of a power-law wealth distribution.
Maybe, because I was born and lived here in SouthEast Asia. Almost no one in my circle or news outlet here talk about avoiding travelling by air. Every national holiday here, you can expect to see people crowded at the airport.
I do understand that traveling by air has higher cabon emission, but I think the experiece and perspective you gain from travelling make you understand the world better.
I do hope we can come up with sustainable alternative of air traveling soon.
Elaborating on the nonlinearizability, on a global scale it doesn't matter if a single person (or an entire city) drives 100 miles to work each day. In isolation their decision to drive has an externality of approximately $0 (wrt carbon). It's only a problem because of the global scale involved -- as an extremely simplistic (and wrong) model for the sake of fitting into a HN comment, there's a fuzzy cutoff point in total carbon production rates below which externalities are small and above which they're devastating and grow rapidly (and superlinearly). Adopting the obvious scheme of dividing total costs by total production, adding a healthy margin to further disincentivize carbon, and assigning that value as an externality tax (which gets updated periodically to never be too inaccurate) won't actually suffice to keep carbon production below the critical threshold because the marginal taxation of externalities for a unit of carbon is substantially less than the marginal externality itself.
Underlying the above example is something that should be obvious to programmers -- not all problems can be efficiently solved by assigning a local value function to autonomous agents. In the case of people we value autonomy as a right in and of itself independently of its ability to benefit the whole, so many potential global optimizations are left on the table, but at the point where we need to enact taxes or legislation to prevent a global problem (e.g. the carbon issue) the illusion of autonomy no longer exists, and we might as well go straight for a solution that has a chance of working (e.g. carbon credits could work if implemented correctly) rather than handicapping ourselves with attempts to adjust our local reward function like trying to tax the externalities.
> on a global scale it doesn't matter if a single person (or an entire city) drives 100 miles to work each day. In isolation their decision to drive has an externality of approximately $0 (wrt carbon)
That's such a disingenuous argument. Their emissions add up. That's like saying at individual level gravity doesn't work because you don't feel a gravity from 1 atom.
If you add oil tax the global consumption falls, it's only a matter of choosing a number big enough to make the total consumption fall below the threshold. I don't understand why you're trying to make it so complicated - we don't only have 1 try, we can introduce tax, look at effects, make corrections.
Opening a valve in your tap isn't linear. But you can pretty easily choose the proper level after a few corrections.
I probably could have phrased it differently to make it more clear, but my argument is _not_ that individual contributions don't add up. Rather, they do add up, and after a certain "critical" threshold they add up to produce superlinear negative externalities and that attempting to price all carbon equally to add up to the sum of those externalities is potentially gameable and still allows for sufficiently profitable activities to effectively ignore them and push global climate change beyond acceptable levels.
> If you add oil tax the global consumption falls, it's only a matter of choosing a number big enough to make the total consumption fall below the threshold.
That's roughly true enough. It's subject to a form of "externality arbitrage" though. Let's say we're outputting enough carbon that externalities grow quickly as a function of carbon output rate. Legislators set a price on carbon based on how bad it currently is. Many activities are still profitable with respect to that tax and are still performed while others are axed. Assume that an agent scales up some profitable carbon-emitting activity, and to make the math simple they personally double global carbon output. By virtue of the fact that we're in a superlinear externality regime they now have to pay $N in taxes while causing damage much greater than $N.
> we don't only have 1 try, we can introduce tax, look at effects, make corrections.
Yes, eventually regulators step in and pick a bigger number, and presumably there are limits to any such profitable carbon-producing activity, so you're right that eventually we could level off total carbon output, but the large slope on that graph of externalities with respect to carbon production rate and the timescales involved in updating the tax code leave plenty of room for exploitation -- it's not an especially stable system that has a natural solution at our desired global output.
> I don't understand why you're trying to make it so complicated
It's...not thaat complicated? If your goal is to limit carbon production to a rate that leads to acceptable levels of climate change (which doesn't have to be your goal, but it's a central assumption in everything I've written, along with the notion that we can address carbon independently from other problems) then the most straightforward way to do that is to set a cap at the level you don't want to exceed and divvy out the credits as you see fit. You could tax those too if you'd like, or sell them, or whatever you want to do, but the critical piece is that to avoid exceeding your desired limit you just set the limit and ban exceeding it. Allowing a theoretically unbounded amount of carbon to be released and trying to manage a quickly-changing economic reality by imposing a flat tax to disincentivize the undesirable behavior is moderately more complicated and has likely, predictable failure modes. Flat externality taxes are not necessarily a bad idea in the abstract, but for the concrete case of carbon and global warming they don't seem like a good fit, at least not by themselves.
I don't understand why you focus so much on "who gets the total above the threshold". It's not a valid question, because you can rearrange the actors and then it would be someone else who tops it off. It's a meaningless question.
Let's say you have 10 agents with emissions e(1)=e(2)=...=e(8)=1 and e(9)=e(10)=4.
Threshold is 10.
If you add up going from 1 to 10 - the 9th agent crosses the threshold.
If you add up going from 10 to 1 - the 6th agent crosses the threshold.
By changing the order of the addition you can blame the externalities on anybody you want :)
> the most straightforward way to do that is to set a cap at the level you don't want to exceed and divvy out the credits as you see fit
It's an independent system that needs to be maintained and supervised, meanwhile we already have tax office and the whole system of state institutions focused on making sure people pay taxes. Besides measuring emissions is hard, measuring fuel usage is easy (we already do it for taxing purposes).
> to avoid exceeding your desired limit you just set the limit and ban exceeding it
Then you have to somehow decide who gets how much. It turns a self-tuning economic system into a centrally planned economy and introduces politics into it.
> the timescales involved in updating the tax code leave plenty of room for exploitation
I see no problem with changing oil tax weekly in the transition period. I doubt we'll need more than 5 corrections.
I don't care about that ordering at all. Assume N actors are each producing on average a mass M of carbon (in some unit time). We set a carbon production tax based on that. Some combination of actors scales up production so that the total volume being produced is 2NM -- we don't care which ones. Total taxes double while total externalities more than double (potentially greatly so).
> It's an independent system that needs to be maintained and supervised
That's a fair point. We have similar systems elsewhere for, e.g., fishery maintenance, but it would require something above and beyond what we have now.
> Besides measuring emissions is hard, measuring fuel usage is easy
Eh. Dealing with trace pollutants and particulates would be harder but for carbon you could easily just add up the major sources and sinks on the supply side rather than trying to actually measure the output. As I'm writing that though, I'm being swayed to your side a bit and agree that's bookkeeping the average household probably wouldn't want to have to consider (so...we're allowed X gallons of gas as long as we don't buy any coal or....).
> Then you have to somehow decide who gets how much. It turns a self-tuning economic system into a centrally planned economy
Potentially. Or you could open up an auction and treat the proceeds as a form of tax.
> and introduces politics into it.
That's going to be a problem with any solution.
> I see no problem with changing oil tax weekly in the transition period.
Is there any tax anywhere that changes faster than yearly? Where does it get applied? Do gas station owners in the middle of nowhere have to keep track of probably wild swings in taxes? Do we apply portions of it at several places in the supply chain and run the risk of somebody creating a more streamlined supply chain around the current tax law?
> I doubt we'll need more than 5 corrections.
I doubt we'll get more than 5 corrections. I bet we would need them.
I see a lot of changes happening. They are overdue, but indeed things are changing. We will suffer from climate change for at least a century or so (depending on whether we will master massive scale carbon sequestration or not), but it's not like humankind isn't trying to reduce CO2 emissions at all.
Right now, all we've done is make non binding "commitments" and then missed them...
That’s what needs to be fixed. Cheaper trains and more direct flights that are cheaper than flying indirect.
To allow airlines to fly less people and remain solvent, ticket prices need to rise. This solution doesn’t address that at all. A minimum cost per mile could work, but needs global implementation.
We can't really solve climate change without some industries shrinking massively or even disappearing. I don't know whether airlines are in that category but expecting to fix it without some pretty big changes isn't realistic.
The reason we do nothing about climate change is that subconsciously we believe it's hopeless.
As that also has the effect of rewarding those who choose not yo fly with money from those who do fly, but eothoit the middleman and with the benefit that it applies to everything.
This is just a bitter journalist training the Guardian-reading climate change freakout crowd to hate the rich.
According to https://phys.org/news/2019-02-income-attitudes-affect-greenh..., transport related GHG emissions are most strongly correlated to income. So it's convenient to sweep air travel under the rug as a small contributor, when the "rich" are the biggest offenders.
You can tell because it's a "data journalist" who forgot to mention she's writing about 2.4% of emissions.
#1 - C02 emissions account for only about half of the overall GHG emissions impact of air travel. Anytime you see someone specifically isolating just the CO2 emissions you know they are either poorly informed or deliberately misleading you.
#2 - It doesn't actually matter. If something is 2.5% of X or 5% of X and X needs to get to 0 then the distinction is without a difference. Its only the tone of phrasing that makes this sound like a counterpoint, when it is in fact not.
#3 - unlike much of the other 95 percent of emissions airline travel is by far the most uniquely isolated to very wealthy (globally speaking) people. If you believe in any basic notion of "progressive taxation", and you apply that to GHG emissions, then getting rich (again globally relatively rich) people to stop flying or fly less is by far the most blatant outlier to address quickly and early.
And capping total prosperity is nothing at all like progressive taxation.
Whats "hysteria" is trying to turn that into a political/social-beliefs debate about "prosperity" or "hating the rich" instead of a simple numbers analysis.
I didn't say that was hysteria, so why are you pretending I did?
The actual purpose of the Guardian piece is to give its readers more reasons to hate the rich.
I find it difficult to understand why intelligent people (such as those on HN) who have themselves profited greatly from freedom and choice, who are often of a progressive and liberal [1] mindset adopt such a reactionary stance when it comes to dealing with climate change.
It is utterly clear from our history that prohibiting or banning something has never really stopped us. If anything, people have invested all their brainpower to finding and exploiting loopholes and the more difficult and illegal something is, the more enticing and attractive it becomes to many.
Wouldn't it be much better to throw our combined brainpower into developing ways to deal with climate change that come without curtailing, prohibiting and banning stuff?
By all means, throw billions of dollars towards fundamental research to create breakthroughs in science and technology, such as airliners powered by renewable energy, methane-free meat production and large-scale carbon capture!
We've done amazing feats before, we put people on the moon, we will probably put them on Mars, why shouldn't we be able to solve climate change and in the process advance our civilization to the next level?
Personally, I'm convinced this will be the easier way compared to artificially limiting ourselves and others which is something that truly has never been sustainable in our history. Telling others what they can and cannot do has always ultimately led to bloodshed and fuelled sectarian and anti-democratic tendencies, always.
I credit incredibly cheap and highly available international travel (for everyone from broke students, business travellers to seniors) with the peace and almost unprecedented level of cooperation between nations and people we have seen in places like Europe and elsewhere. Think of it this way: You are unlikely to vote for someone to go to war with countries you fly to on holiday every year, you are unlikely to want to bomb places with whom you have extensive and intertwined trading and manufacturing relationships, you're unlikely to join the army and go shoot people with whom you've broken bread and gotten drunk on your "incredibly cheap" international road trip with a no-frills airline on your gap year before college.
Force everyone but the rich (who will ALWAYS be able to afford travelling internationally, no matter how high you tax it) back to rarely or never leaving their country, state or hometown and you'll grow a generation of reactionary hillbillies who get all their information second- or third-hand from the media if at all and whom you can rile up to go to war with "Oceania" or "Eastasia" or "throw out those pesky immigrants" with a little propaganda at any time. You'll throw civilization back a hundred years.
If you, on the other hand, foster international relationships, exchange ideas and people freely, then you will spark innovation, ideas and cooperation and ideally you will get progress and better conditions almost as a by-product of international exchange.
Smallmindedness, backward thinking and limited horizons have never benefitted humanity or any larger group of people in the long run.
Innovators, inventors, internationally collaborating scientists and, yes, merchants and traders with an international focus are those who have brought us everything we have today.
Stepping out of the (allegoric [2]) cave was once the first step to advance as a species. I'd argue that in many ways international travel and freedom of movement is us stepping out of our caves again today. Into a bigger world of knowledge, cooperation and scientific advancement.
Limiting our horizons (by whatever means) is not the solution.
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[1] not in the political meaning of these words as commonly used in the US, but to mean forward-thinking and open to progress