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Comment by tejohnso | Hacker News Reader

I'm with you. I've been saying "gas is too cheap", half joking, for years. That's just based off of watching people's use of their vehicles, having not the slightest concern for gasoline cost. It's not even considered in the list of tradeoffs when making plans.

I think it should be expensive enough so that at least a median income person making a completely frivolous trip stops for half a second to consider the cost.

I'm sure it's more complicated than that. Lower income folks who have less of a choice, for example. A real policy would take some work.

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The best approach would be to gradually phase in a revenue neutral carbon tax where an equal amount of money is rebated to everyone. That way those who use less fuel than average would end up financially net positive.

Except that the people who use the most fuel are not the most wealthy. People in rural or low cost areas who need to commute. People who work shifts at odd hours. Trades who need to carry tools. The people who buy the least gas are those who can work from home and drive a Tesla: rich people. They don't need more money.

This is cherry picking examples from different income bands. We know that people in higher income bands consume more fossil fuels per capita, on average. They would therefore pay more carbon tax.

I would guess that Tesla owning households still have higher than average fossil consumption at present because their higher incomes also positively correlate with flying more and consuming more goods that were at least partially made with fossil fuels. The very poorest people in the US can't afford to drive even a used car.

More fossile fuels/energy for thier lifestyles, yes. Gas for thier cars, no.

London realized this as the early efforts to reduce costs for zero-emmission vehicles went to Tesla and BMW owners, not the tiny/cheap electric cars everyone expected to come to market.

> More fossile fuels/energy for thier lifestyles, yes. Gas for thier cars, no.

"revenue neutral carbon tax where an equal amount of money is rebated to everyone" doesn't sound like it's specific to gas for cars.

> London realized this as the early efforts to reduce costs for zero-emmission vehicles went to Tesla and BMW owners, not the tiny lightweight/cheap electric cars everyone expected to come to market.

Is that bad? Normally those incentives are a fixed amount per car, so in climate improvement per dollar it should be similar or even better for big fancy cars. And anyone that designs a small cheap electric car can still get the incentive, so it's not like those fancy cars are to blame if there's a lack of them. And we are getting more variety as time passes.

If you want to give less money to rich people, don't exclude them from the car incentives, give them an unconditional tax and let them get money back with the car incentives.

The congestion charge was meant to reduce congestion. Seeing giant teslas sail through without paying was not the intention of the zero emission exemption. Planners expected electric minis, not electric supercars.

I don't think the people making the law are fools. If they didn't put in a size requirement, that's on purpose.

Also big cars don't congest much more than small cars, do they? When you take into account the space between vehicles, the difference isn't that great.

(And again if the issue is expensive cars specifically, you don't want a congestion charge or a fuel charge, you want a supercar charge or a high-income charge.)

No, it's meant to remove the most polluting vehicles from the London area, which it will succeed in doing. Remove the pollution and the health benefits are soon realised. Hopefully by the 2030s people will breathe a bit easier.

Nradov's post said revenue neutral carbon tax, not gas tax. That includes fossil energy consumed directly or indirectly.

Then they should stop driving so much. That’s the whole point. A tax that discourages any large amount of people to drive gas guzzlers is working correctly.

Europe is filled with lower and middle income people as well. They don’t take jobs with a 1 hour drive using a truck that gets 13 MPG.

A way to avoid that problem is to make the carbon tax more targeted in the beginning. People in rural are not in danger if we started to tax oil, gas and coal power plants based on how much they pollute.

After that we can add a carbon tax to the transportation sector by adding a tariff that scale with carbon pollution.

After that, carbon tax newly built home heating systems.

After that, continue to add new carbon taxes while monitoring who get effect until one can't add more without harming people who has no choice.

Do we really want people to have rural commuter jobs?

Also most tools aren't heavy and "odd hours" will decrease your fuel use!

If the price go up everything will be extracted. I would prefer the price go down because of competition of renewable energies with low prices. If price stay low gas and oil will not be extracted at all and will not been burn.

Not if the price is raised through taxes.

Is it really too cheap or did you just start hanging out with people rich enough to ignore the cost?

You say gas should go up, but how are they going to pay that cost? This is what the yellow jacket protests where about. Relatively well off Parisians dictating how the rest of the country should work.

If you could designate a certain trip as your commute and kids' school and get reimbursed for the tax on that, it would fix some of the distributional effects.

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