I think we should create a carbon/pollution tax and let the invisible hand of the market figure that out - it's too complex and there are so many side effects to adjusting things by brute force!
Any individual country implementing a carbon tax doesn't work because they put themselves at a big disadvantage, and goods and services go across country borders, taking with them almost-impossible to fairly calculate amounts of carbon.
The biggest things the world could do towards the "world dictator" approach would be:
* Have a consortium of countries implement a carbon tax, while taxing all inbound goods from countries that don't tax carbon.
* Adjust WTO rules to allow taxing imports based on estimated carbon content.
* Have the WTO decide which countries are "on track to meet carbon reduction targets". Allow taxes on imports from any country that isn't.
* Allow countries to "sue" another country for environmental damages. When they don't pay up, have a UN court able to threaten anything up to military action/takeover of the country's leadership to get payment.
I would think the invisible hand of the market would re-route all that pollution to areas without the tax and the earth wouldn't see that much difference. It's not like they're going to stop selling oil if the EU and US agree to stop burning so much of it.
I agree it's complex, but I think carbon taxes might be part of the complexity. If we're going to start messing about with markets, we should outright ban the offending activity and regulate harshly. If we're going to apply tokenomics to the problem and pretend we fixed it until we're too old to care, that seems worse somehow.
Or we can just do nothing and hope technology saves us. That's what the actual bet is whether we like it or not.
The worst thing that could happen would be some 'world dictator' making universal rules because then large companies could lobby one entity to shift the rules in their favor, and against ours.
Surely the worst thing would be to set up a Prisoners Dilemma trap where individual countries have a huge incentive to betray all the other countries by abandoning this tax and attracting all the large companies in the world to come and pollute there.
If one country did that, the immediate response from all other countries could simply be 'stop all trade with that country' or simply 'crank up the import taxes from them' until they shape up.
You also don't need anywhere near 100% agreement for this to be effective. A large company losing just a few key markets (US, Germany, UK, blah) could massively outweigh any benefit they could imagine by trying to game such a system.
If the market re-routed around that by building electric cars for instance then isn't that exactly what we want?
The nice thing about fossil fuels is it's fairly easy to identify and tax extraction. The problem is those industries will fight tooth and nail against any attempt to tax them.
On the other hand I do wonder what happens if carbon taxes become a substantial proportion of government revenues. Then there could be a tension between raising revenue and reducing consumption.
This prevents the tax from simply causing the production of the goods to move overseas, and also encourages your country's trade partners to adopt a carbon tax themselves (so they'll be exempt from the carbon tariff).
Such a policy is not attempting to distort the market so much as simply price in an externality that is currently causing the market to perform poorly. It says simply that, while I am still allowed to hop on a 3000-mile flight to visit San Fransisco for the weekend, I need to compensate you and your family (and everyone else in the country) for the associated damages.
On the other hand, because human civilization is so complex, outright bans and strict regulations on emissive activity are inevitably going to be ham-handed and will either be ineffectual or else too onerous to be politically viable in a democracy.
The original question was how to find out the carbon footprint of goods.
So a benefit of this policy is that environmentally conscious private citizens no longer need to feebly grapple with such questions. You and I just optimize for personal expense and our own happiness while computing the carbon footprints of various things is the responsibility of institutions that actually have the resources to do it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_emission_trading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_emission_trading#Critic... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Kyoto_Protoco...
Carbon emissions trading does have an impact on carbon emissions, but it also detracts from the fundamental issue at hand - overreliance on fossil fuels in key industries and the need for a fundamental shift in our infrastructure in how energy is produced/consumed - while the costs, ultimately, get deferred elsewhere e.g. individual consumers.