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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

A carbon tax that would be high enough to force changes quickly enough would also be devastating for the poorer segment of the population and hence very hard to pass in a democracy. I mixture of a carbon price and other measures can be easier to sell to the voters.

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taxes on usage/consumption could be progressive.

Using X costs you Y Using XX costs you YYY Using XXX costs you YYYYYY

This way water, electricity would still be cheap for most and would incentivise to stop overusing it.

You could still get a cheap flight once a year, but you won't be able to fly every weekend.

> taxes on usage/consumption could be progressive.

Ideally the poor part of the population should be able to use the roads in the same proportion as the wealthy part of the population. Putting taxes on road usage (which what fuel taxes actually represent) will hit the poor part of the population way harder than the wealthy (or even the middle-class) part of said population.

> You could still get a cheap flight once a year, but you won't be able to fly every weekend.

That used to be one of the few remaining "pleasures of life" for a big part of the lower and lower-middle-classes from Western Europe. It was actually cheaper to fly with your lads from Luton Airport to somewhere in Eastern Europe on Friday afternoon and come back late on Sunday, all this while having lots of fun (from said lads' perspective). Taking this away from them will mean them having to hit the very expensive pubs/bars of Manchester or Oslo and not having the same amounts of fun because the money for purchasing said fun (i.e. alcohol) will just not be there. Unhappy lads may mean an unhappy populace ready to throw stones at the powers that be.

As such, the upcoming football matches from the next few months in the European big leagues will be a very good litmus test, it will be the first time in one year and a half when we'll have lots of young people together ready to scream at things (the opposing teams' players or the said powers that be). We've already had one game suspended this weekend in Montpellier (Southern France) because of fans throwing bottles at the opposing team's players.

> Ideally the poor part of the population should be able to use the roads in the same proportion as the wealthy

Yeah unless you want to give everyone the same income or have some other way of not needing money to travel anymore, that's just not going to be the case. Also today, the wealthy could do road trips much more often than the poor could. That much won't change, I think the best we can hope for is either a slight improvement or not make it worse, for example by taxing heavy use more significantly like GP proposes. I consider myself wealthy but if using 3x the average adds 5x the tax, it's not as if I have unlimited money just like the vast majority of people.

> Using X costs you Y Using XX costs you YYY Using XXX costs you YYYYYY

And instead of one company or person using XXX, you will have a three small companies using X or one person having three cars in his garage that just happen to each be registered under a different person.

Exponential taxes are a hell of a lot of an incentive to avoid them and you see how far people go to just avoid linear ones. Also, managing the company tax depending on how much the consumer used so far is going to be bureaucracy hell. It's a nice idea, but I highly doubt it will be possible to implement, especially when far easier and straight-forward measures already fail to get through legislation.

I'm well aware of that. I remember reading a story about one of the cities in Asia which forbidden car traffic with driver only. Soon there were passengers for hire standing by the road.

If AWS can charge their clients by milliseconds then I'm pretty sure an airline can add a zero to a 10th ticket booked on the same passenger's name.

The number of products/services taxed progressively wouldn't have to be huge to make a difference. You don't need to progressively tax an electric toothbrush just energy consumption, but all products should be taxed based on their production externalities.

Or you could return the money to the poor by reducing the income tax in lower tax brackets.

This still maintains the incentives, but removes, on average, the financial hit.

Only if the tax isn't redistributed.

Most poorer people would get money in such a system.

If we want to be carbon neutral in twenty years, poorer people need pretty strong incentives too. I don't see that working out if the carbon tax is mostly cost neutral for them.

They still have the incentive, they would gain more money if they have a smaller carbon footprint.

They'll have a choice between two similar products. One is $10 because of a $5 carbon charge, the other is $6 with a $0 carbon charge. What will they choose?

They'll choose the $6 one, and keep their carbon tax dividend in their pocket too.

They won't really be worse off.

On the other hand, the rich will be worse off because they take more flights, consume more resources, and generally cause more carbon emissions anyway from their day-to-day lives.

Eh, many poor people don't have a choice when it comes to two their biggest carbon sources: transportation and heating. They're forced to use an old ICE to get to work, because biking and public transport is not practical for them, and they live in a rented apartment that is heated with oil or gas.

Investments into public transport and bike infrastructure is relatively cheap and improves streets for everyone.

Taking a car lane and/or parking and making a dedicated bus and bike lane out of it will reduce congestion and increase the mobility of nearly everyone.

Sure, but that is something that a poor person has very little influence on.

Yes, I think the point still stands. A carbon tax is an efficient measure that will reduce emissions and not harm poor demographics.

However there are other things we can do as well to reduce emissions as well as increase life quality at the same time (improve public transport and bicycle infrastructure) where poor people benefit especially.

True, but we generally waste a lot of our emissions because fossil fuel energy is so cheap. People don't realize that you can save a ton of energy by, say, reducing the thermostat set point on your hot water heater, or putting plastic film over your windows and searching for and blocking drafts when it gets cold (or hot!) A lot of energy use is just habit that can be changed with very little cost, if the incentive is in place.

Granted, that won't get us to net zero, but there are a lot of high-impact, low investment changes we can all make.

Longer term, if fossil fuel energy places rise, I expect a lot more pressure put on local governments to make public transportation more accessible, and to remove legislation that blocks the building of walkable neighborhoods and cities. I'm convinced that the vast majority of driving we do is completely unnecessary, and is just the result of myopic laws about how we can build cities and suburbs that tend not to get challenged, which lead to us just building in a really dumb way that ensures everyone needs to drive.

Unless you are a factory putting out metric tons of CO2 I don't think the tax is going to be much to sneeze at for most people. Gas going up another 50 cents a gallon doesn't actually make that big of a dent to your pocket book at the end of the day, especially in cities where rent is already like $2000 a month for a single. If you fill up your car once a week, even if the tax at the pump was a full dollar, you are throwing down like $48 extra a month, or 2.4% your rent. Seems reasonable to me.

Poor people don't emit much carbon, this is a problem for the rich rather than poor.

In fact their lives might well get better if the rest of us are forced into using public transport.

Poor people should not be told to reduce their emissions by people who emit an order of magnitude more carbon than they do.

They should receive a negative carbon tax for their good behavior, which could be delivered in a subsidy for the purchase of cleaner fuel sources.

That is exactly what happens with a redistributed carbon tax.

needs to be coupled with subsidies for alternatives, transport (public, electric vehicles, etc) and with the knowledge that a poor person will drive that old diesel car into the ground, so give them an incentive to switch.

Why not a carbon tax that's used to pull carbon out of the atmosphere? It's pretty much inevitable that we have to pull carbon out of the atmosphere at scale at some point.

You mean like growing forests, and store it for hundred years or more in the form of houses?

Or in a worst case, growing it and burying it in massive heaps so the already collected CO2 is stored and new threes are allowed to grow?

Yes. Bury it, put it into use for hundreds of years. Anything that stores the carbon in the long-term. It's inevitable that we have to do this one way or another.

Not if offset by other taxes (such as income tax, consumption taxes on renewables, etc).

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