A 200% value-added tax on fossil fuels that rises by 10% every year would provide the capital.
EDIT: To clarify, this is not a suggestion to raise capital from the tax as much as it's to raise capital from the use of fossil fuels. It's a suggestion for an increasingly punitive financial cost to force behavioural changes.
Because the former doesn't really cause inflation (it just sits on the bank's balance sheets), whereas printing money for infrastructure projects is.
That's exactly what carbon tax is. Some companies will be exempt, others will be issuing "carbox tax loans". Only regular people will suffer with this
Do you understand you're saying give even more money to the people that have been leading the world to its destruction, so they will make it better
This is a pro-climate and anti-human policy. Do you care more about human beings or the amount of CO2 in the air?
There are still billions of people who have no electricity. Let's get them closer to our standard of living before we make everything more expensive for them.
Making everything cost more for everyone...doesn't sound like much of a compromise
Thinking that cost just means paying more -> bad is a very simplistic way to look at things.
Cost, especially via taxation, means setting aside a part of our productivity as a planet towards making sure we don't destroy ourselves. Everybody should contribute because everyone has skin in the game. By taxing CO2 specifically, you force people towards choosing more sustainable choices automatically.
Understand that you can't have a completely free market and an environment in which you want to live.
The environment you are proposing is unlivable. When you are living on less than $2 a day, things costing more is a matter of life and death.
Your fellow humans need more sources of reliable energy, not less.
All change is going to disproportionately impact the disadvantaged. But I don't think we can let that be an argument against change in general.
If we instituted a vehicle weight / mileage tax (to fund road repair as EVs cut into the already wildly inadequate gas tax) and send a message that gas prices will never be cheaper in the future, that would change rapidly because there wouldn't be any way to fool yourself into thinking that you could afford that huge SUV which has been keeping you broke for years. It takes a lot to disturb a deeply-entrenched status quo and I think taxes are key, but I would ramp them in slower: set a floor on the cost for a barrel of oil and increase it annually so the writing is on the wall but there's time to make major capital expenditures.
The political backlash is a real problem, especially with the knowledge that the simple solutions like giving people financial assistance for replacing high-emissions vehicles would be met with a well-funded deluge of bad faith attacks (you can just hear the “why are they giving away Teslas to people who didn't earn them!” ads now). I suspect continued subsidies for things like EVs and solar would be possible but I wonder whether there could also be a low-rate loan subsidy program, especially for homeowners and businesses looking to electrify things like heaters, boilers, etc.
Unfortunately economic contraction is going to essential if we are going to reduce GHG emissions. We've tried the "full steam ahead, green energy will catch up!" approach for decades and it emissions have only gotten worse.
Don't forget those same people that would suffer from not having cars will suffer even more under the worse case climate scenarios.
Seeing as how the global financial system is a thing we all kind of just made up.
What good is finance when we're dead?
By implication, this requires an infinite human population on Earth on an infinite timescale.
The still very young global financial system and everything in it is and always has been a Ponzi scheme.
every year from now on is going to get worse.
I sincerely don't think it would cause a financial collapse, as ridiculous as that might sound.
200% plus 10% compounding per annum is the lowest I think we could reasonably go in order to be in with a chance of reaching peak carbon by 2030.
It forces deeply painful changes on the world, but no more painful than is necessary to avoid the collapse of civilisation.
The problem until now is that people haven't been given the justification to go along with the astronomical task being asked (i.e. Stop burning fossil fuels immediately or we all die).
1. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/28/196355493/econ...
Citizens get rebates based on income, so poorer individuals get larger rebates as a percent of income and can actually come out ahead even with rising prices due to the carbon tax.
More wealthy citizens will (due to lifestyle differences) pay more in taxes than they get back, but they also have the means to change their lifestyles/make different choices, so they could end up in a spot where they use less carbon and so also come out ahead.
It's a very simple mechanism to modify behaviour and does do in a relatively equitable way.
We could be saved by technological or business breakthrough from an individual, or we could be saved by authoritarianism, but the preference you just described is why we're probably fucked if we hope for a political solution in western democracies (at least the US).