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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

It's the same result when one tries to run an economy through regulation, for the same reasons. A better way would be by incentives.

For example, there are regulations that 100 ppm of pollution X is illegal, while 99 ppm of X is legal. Emit 99 ppm, and you're good. Emit 100 ppm and your plant gets shut down. Even worse, you can emit 99 ppm for 10 hours and you're legal, but emit 100 ppm for 1 minute and you're illegal.

A far better approach is to tax total X emitted, not the rate, and not binary legal/illegal:

    100 ppm for 1 minute times $1/ppm = $100 tax
    99 ppm for 10 hours times $1/ppm = $59,400 tax

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A different approach is to incentivise behaviour sure, that doesn't mean it's inherently better.

A plant shutdown at 100ppm will likely result in running the plant at 90ppm to account for the risk of breaching the limit. But if I only pay an extra $100/min when run at 100ppm I'm better off running at 99ppm and just paying the extra tax when I occassionaly exceed 100ppm.

In your example, the tax incentivises you to pollute to the point you can afford. It might be cheaper to just pay the tax than actually make the required changes to your process.

However if the regulation sets a strict limit you don't have a choice, you have to make the changes necessary to comply with the regulations.

To the author's original point, it is important to look and what you are trying to achieve and why. In some cases tax incentives/penalties will make sense. In others strict limits/bans will be required.

> It might be cheaper to just pay the tax than actually make the required changes to your process.

The idea is to increase the tax rate so there is enough incentive for the total aggregate of pollution across all the producers to be reduced to an acceptable level.

At the very least the numbers of 99 ppm and 100ppm are measurement of the problem that one is trying to solve. The more typical braindead form of regulation would mandate one specific kind of mitigation regardless of the current level of pollution. While at the same time it is, of course, a pure coincidence that the more polluting company is friends with a politician while the less polluting company that now has to pay for less necessary or unnecessary mitigation is not friends with said politician.

> the numbers of 99 ppm and 100ppm are measurement of the problem that one is trying to solve

Not for air pollution. There the total emissions are of interest, not the rate. Car emissions, for example, are regulated for their rate of emission, not total emissions.

Even there, ppm is a suboptimal (maybe even terrible) measure. If I can find a way to pump additional air through the exhaust (increasing the denominator), I can lower my tailpipe ppm without lowering the rate of emitted pollutant (the numerator).

Of course, there are many ways to reduce the rate (as you mention), and of course, the government has made such modifications illegal.

My proposal is to measure the emission rate, multiply it by the mileage driven in the last year, multiply by the tax rate, and pay the tax to renew the license.

It's not perfect, but it's simple and a far better approximation than the existing brain-dead method. Instead of incentivizing drivers to just pass the test, they are incentivized to minimize the total pollution their driving emits.

In this case, “I” was intended to mean an automotive engineer working to comply with a government ppm-metric-driven regulation, not an end consumer, but my words were definitely ambiguous on that topic.

> would mandate one specific kind of mitigation

I agree that's bad. Far better to specify the goal, not the process.

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