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Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that the conflicts will be mostly-economic. If enough countries can get together to form a carbon-taxation bloc, they can begin to impose duties upon countries and companies that don't participate.

Barring a quantum leap in technology, it is a social innovation like that one that might allow us to successfully address the climate crisis.

From a climate/environmental perspective, I believe one of the worst things that can happen is a global-scale war. When short-term survival is threatened, countries will think little of devastating natural reserves and cutting through environmental protections.

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> If enough countries can get together to form a carbon-taxation bloc, they can begin to impose duties upon countries and companies that don't participate.

This is the only way humans will ever beat climate change.

It'll work because as soon as that bloc is operational, the bloc can charge ultra high tariffs for importing carbon-including goods. Supposedly those will cover the fact the amount of embedded carbon is hard to measure, but actually because it benefits all the countries in the bloc to overestimate the carbon of imports to the detriment of countries outside the bloc.

I predict that as soon as such a bloc is near to formation, politics will move super fast and within a few years dramatic economic changes will occur because no country wants to be last to get an invite to the bloc (and the more countries join, the more stringent joining requirements will become).

I heard this as the only way to get China/India to voluntarily start doing their own internal carbon program.

Essentially, you charge them when they try to import into your country a tax to account for that. They come back and say "this tax really stinks...how can we make it stop"? You then reply "start your own carbon tax and we'll remove it". They then have two options 1.) Pay a tax to another government, or 2.) Take care of it internally

I think this is entirely plausible.

To put the emissions of India in context: by cumulative emissions since 1750, India is number 7, having caused roughly half as many emissions as my home country Germany (number 4). The US is number 1.

Source: animated graphics at https://twitter.com/CarbonBrief/status/1120715988532629506

tariffs don't work like a tax to the producer they are an extra tax on the end customer.

A widget made in china that has a tariff on it doesn't cost the company in china anymore - it does increase the cost for the person buying here though.... but unless there is a competitor that can sell a competive product cheaper than that the only downside is to the customer.

Tariffs on a widget made in China would make that widget less competitive relative to competing widgets made in other countries. Chinese widget sales would fall, so it would “cost” them in the form of reduced sales and profits.

Even if there is no competing widget, sales still fall due to demand elasticity.

Has such a bloc been formally proposed?

That's a very interesting resolution to the tragedy of the commons issue that heterogeneous state actors face. As long as you have a bloc sufficiently large enough that's willing to impose import duties on non-complying countries, then you've effectively brought everyone along for the ride.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade was shut down largely by the UK unilaterally declaring it illegal (although this was done in the context of the US planning on doing so as well), and then sending in its navy to force other countries to also agree to ban slave trading or seize ships that were violating it.

“carbon-taxation bloc”

This will be labeled imperialism with shades of white supremacy.

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