If you want less carbon burned, tax carbon. I'm skeptical of cryptocurrency, but the idea that regulators, already captured by banks, should aggressively ban new financial products that may one day threaten the incumbents makes me wary.
Unless you are suggesting taxing crypto itself, in which case… sure!
In other words, the amount it takes in can be given back to the average person -- in forms of tax rebates, investment in public transit, education, whatever. In an ideal world a carbon tax would have no adverse impact on lower and middle class people.
I should also add that in that world higher electricity cost due to carbon tax is a good thing -- it'll help carbon-neutral sources of energy to compete and replace the more dirty forms. Which is exactly what we want.
[1] - https://citizensclimatelobby.org/carbon-pricing-studies/
But perhaps more importantly, you wouldn't be taxed because others are using electricity for virtual money. You would be taxed because your carbon emissions are causing climate change, and to encourage you to reduce energy usage where possible.
All money has a cost on society. You have to do something to maintain its value. You don't think wars in the middle east -- to maintain the petrodollar -- have an environmental impact?
And when it isn't oil it'll be fights over germanium and lithium veins.
If you actually cared to do more than sit in a chair -- advocating random things you didn't research -- you'd be advocating for Thorium power. Thorium is nearly as abundant as lead -- it's all over the place -- and it's much more clean and less dangerous than even solar or wind.
Also, you can make the tax progressive so that the high consumers can pay much more.
An obvious example is the existence of pseudonymous digital payments. Given that cryptocurrency already exists, and will continue to exist for all illicit activities even if you ban it, you might as well let people open numbered accounts at a bank.
Do this for any other advantage cryptocurrency has over the existing banking system and there is no more demand for cryptocurrency. And without demand, the price crashes and people stop burning coal to mine it.
What if we want to decide that we want to minimise carbon, but some use of energy is preferable (for instance consumer/home use) to bootstrapping new financial products?
and that's where the price signals what is preferable. The correct allocation of energy should be based on the price people are willing to pay for the energy. Like any other commodity.
Why? Why is that 'correct'? Why would we not want to ensure the population has affordable energy for home use, but others seeking to make a profit from it rather than use it for basic needs pay more?
You phrase your reply as some sort of moral absolute, but it's nothing of the sort.
Because we already have the former and we don't need the latter.
A carbon tax with a dividend doesn't make life harder for lower income people, because they already have below-average energy consumption (wealthier people have bigger houses that need more heat etc.) and as a result the dividend would be larger than what they pay in tax.
But you still want them to have good incentives. If they can use the dividend to switch to solar or buy an electric car, you want them to do this, because that's the whole point.
Meanwhile there is no reason to charge profit-seeking enterprises more than the true cost of their usage, because all that's doing is inhibiting economically productive activity. Aluminum smelting uses a tremendous amount of electricity, but what you want is to cause them to switch to non-carbon electrical generation, not to shut down operations.
Is not what was being proposed in the free-market fundamentalist post I was replying to.
> Meanwhile there is no reason to charge profit-seeking enterprises more than the true cost of their usage
But there might be if it's merely "burning energy for a new financial product", society might decide that it's not worth the carbon to have that around, regardless of tax, but that aluminium is a useful physical product.
We have differential taxes on all sorts of things, I don't see why they would be so wrong here.
But even given all that, my comment you're replying to was specifically adressing the "price should be the only indicator" assertions in the libertarian spiel above.
A carbon tax with a dividend is the free-market fundamentalist proposal. Markets require externalities to be priced and a dividend is the most economically efficient use of the revenue so generated.
> But there might be if it's merely "burning energy for a new financial product", society might decide that it's not worth the carbon to have that around, regardless of tax, but that aluminium is a useful physical product.
The way of determining which is pricing. If society values "new financial product" more than the cost of the energy, including the carbon tax, then it gets produced. If the carbon tax increases energy costs to the point that "new financial product" isn't viable in the market, it doesn't. Or it switches to non-carbon electrical generation at which point you can't blame them for climate change anymore and they're expediting the transition to renewable energy by financing the creation of generating capacity and increasing economies of scale.
It's specifically not the one I was replying to -
"The correct allocation of energy should be based on the price people are willing to pay for the energy. Like any other commodity."
> The way of determining which is pricing.
It's not the only way, it's not even the only way that's employed right now in a lot of places, for instance we don't apply sales tax to items we deem 'essential' here in the UK, have a 5% rate for some things and 20% for 'luxuries'.
Price is not the only mechanism available, nor is it always the best one.
This is in no way inconsistent with the need to price externalities, which is the default assumption in free market theories. (Otherwise you have obvious problems with people dumping industrial waste into rivers etc.)
> It's not the only way, it's not even the only way that's employed right now in a lot of places, for instance we don't apply sales tax to items we deem 'essential' here in the UK, have a 5% rate for some things and 20% for 'luxuries'.
Just because somebody does something doesn't make it a good idea.
Things like that have counterintuitive economic consequences. See what subsidized student loans do to education prices. Is this what we want for "essential" goods?
If we do that, the tax rate has to be higher for non-"essential" goods in order to generate a given amount of revenue. Now you're into central planning to determine what's "essential" and what isn't. Is a laptop a luxury good? A poor person might need one. What about an electric car? Meanwhile every such decision of what to tax more is subject to lobbying and corruption.
If you want to help the poor, give them money. They know what's "essential" to them better than the bureaucracy does.
There's nothing in free markets that will make this happen without regulation, as evidenced by the fact that it so far hasn't happened.
> Just because somebody does something doesn't make it a good idea.
No, but it also doesn't make it impossible or something which can just be dismissed. There blatantly are mechanisms that can be used other than the ones you mentioned. You don't like them, that's not the same as them not existing.
However ridiculous you want to make the results - oh my god now you're into planning! - this already happens in quite a number of pretty successful countries, so it's clearly not some bizarre fantasy.
According to hardcore libertarian free market theory, polluting someone else's property without their permission is a violation of their property rights. In principle this would make it impractical to burn anything at all, because the combustion products go out into the air and spread to someone else's property without their permission. You would need the permission of everybody everywhere, for which they would want to extract payment.
Obviously that isn't how it's implemented in the US, but that's what the theory says should happen.
A carbon tax + dividend is a pragmatic alternative. The criticism of it is actually that it gives the polluters too much -- maybe someone thinks the tax isn't high enough and wants to demand more of the carbon emitters. By implementing the tax you're taking away their right to refuse to have their air polluted and hold out for higher payment from the carbon emitters.
> You don't like them, that's not the same as them not existing.
Nobody was claiming that implementations of bad ideas don't exist.
Actually it sounded a lot like you were saying that the only way to do this was pricing.
Either way, you'd have to go a long way to convince me that the free market ideology principles are always better than what we can see working in a number of wealthy, successful countries already.
A carbon tax and dividend is certainly one way that such things could be achieved, though it's not the only way and it is a blunt instrument. It's not the only way or necessarily the best, and it doesn't allow a society to make choices with much granularity.
Your argument is basically that it is wrong to do so - I think that's a pseudo-religious belief.
i argue that pricing carbon is the only way to allow everyone in society to make their own choice with the granularity that you propose.
After all, when has central planning ever taken everyone into account properly? How will i know that policy makers will take my interests into account when they plan policies?
And in this specific case, what about the people who _do_ want to mine crypto? Why do they get the bad end of the stick, just because some authority says so?
That's the point - it's perfectly fine for a society to decide what energy can and can't be used for, because we don't live in a time when we have infinite, environmentally neutral power available to us.