The solution is quite simple too. Make fuel $10/gallon. If that is not sufficient, then $20, or $30. And so on.
You will be displacing 10s if not 100s of millions of people with such a policy, you need a place for them to go if you don't want severe civil unrest.
The average American would be paying $0.
Unfortunately for us (and the world) this was too complicated for many Australians to understand and the political right exploited that to tell a scary story about a 'new tax', leading to their election and the removal of the scheme.
While economists (and rational thinkers) generally love carbon pricing schemes, they have been pretty unsuccessful politically because people are generally too stupid to understand them and cynical politicians in bed with the fossil fuel industry are happy to play to that.
Edit: For clarification, if it's the type of rebate typical in the US, that means I get it later and I can't afford the fuel now. If it's a rebate that's done at the time of purchase, then it wouldn't seem to make much difference, on average.
It's not done at time of purchase because it is not a gas subsidy.
Starbucks won’t cover 400 dollar daily commutes for baristas in downtown SF.
Why do so many people want to play dictator these days?
[1] the infrastructure bill that’s looking to pass, while it gives much needed funding to public transit, still centers car-centric planning, and nothing paradigm-shifting (e.g. a comprehensive regional high speed rail network, a dedicated bus line on every street, a protected bike lane on every arterial) will likely come from it.
Happy to tax one option to support a better option.
In a social practice sense I'd prefer transparency to see the tax money actually making a better future. But this is often lost or not communicated.
If I say "I will give you $20 to not drive" or "I will take $20 from you if you drive", the only thing that really matters is that there is a $20 price differential between two actions so you will be at a $20 disadvantage to do the current thing regardless of how you word it.
Money and wealth is relative so the actual final amount doesn't matter as much as how much you have compared to the average person.
A tax/higher prices on fuel would push people to more efficient methods faster and will put more money in to investments on new technology.
The number of electric cars sold in 2020 was ~250k.
The average age of a car in the US is 12 years.
If electric car sales quadruple each year until they reach the total number of cars sold in the US (around 16 million cars per year), it will take at least 18 years to replace all the combustion engine cars on the road.
And this is wildly optimistic, electric cars are too few and too expensive, even as second hard cars, for the general population. I estimate that they'll reach a sort of break-even point with combustion engine cars around 2025 or so. So you can probably add 3-4 more years to those 18 I counted. So at least 20 years to have a mass replacement of existing cars on the road.
And in the rest of the world it's even worse. The rest of the world is poorer, has lower disposable income, cars are around for longer, and electric car sales are ramping up even slower.
Cars are also one of the few greenhouse emissions sources which we have a plausible market driven path to eliminate over the next 2 decades via battery electric vehicles.
We need good planning but then we also need to factor in the environmental costs of driving to eliminate it.
In my case driving would increase my commute time by about 20 minutes due to traffic. My city has no appetite for improving driving options or reducing congestion through the addition of new roads.
But I doubt the average American will give up the quality of life of owning a car that probably weighs have half a ton more than the average European car.
Wouldn't the more immediate effect be that the poor stop coming into cities?
The cost of owning, operating, and insuring a vehicle is a pretty high tax.
Funny thing about public transit too, if you build transit to businesses in walkable communities you don't just help the poor.
The actual price of fuel does not matter much, only the price you are paying relative to others with the same job title.
I wish it were so. I desperately wish this were entirely true.
It's not like you can just choose to not work anymore. If your job is a long commute away that's money you have to spend no matter what on transport.
There often aren't other options. Most transit in North America sucks inside cities and doesn't serve outlying areas very well at all.
Long commutes are an effect of companies centralizing in big urban areas. They don't care how long it takes their workers to get to the office as long as they don't have to pay for it.
Maybe make companies responsible for their employees gas, insurance, and commute times, you might see satellite offices spring up all over the place in more rural areas so their workforce has smaller commute times.
I've done transit in most of the major cities in Canada to/from work & school, or airports, and most are pretty decent.
I don't know that transit should really serve outlying areas?
But of course it's not really practical.
If employees have to pay more on a commute, it will change companies' behavior.
I don't see why it would, why do you think that?
Maximizing the speed of implementing renewable energy that can power EV's, and scaling EV production to more affordable levels are much less likely to stomp on the poor. And unlike trying to raise gas prices to $30 it's actually realistic from a social/political standpoint, especially since we're already on that path, just not as fast as we could be.
This is not a simple problem, and it's exceedingly rare that a complex problem has such a simple solution as this. Even the renewable/EV combo has inumerable variables behind it that have taken decades to get us to the point we're at now.
If we're going to tinker with things in that way, it's better to do it on the side of pushing renewables and EV's as fast as possible. Until then, things like raising a gas tax are regressive, falling significantly harder on people least able to bear the extra burden.
If the bottom 25% of the economic ladder get stomped on and pushed into poverty (when not already there) how does that help? It will set things back: Because the people getting stomped, going hungry, working 2 jobs and 60hours a week-- they're not going to sit back and suffer in silence as things get worse. The backlash would be enormous and political pressure insurmountable.
We need solutions that account for the people impacted by them or we'll get nowhere. Throwing your hands up and saying Fine, "live is up while we can" because a simple solution doesn't solve a complex problem is defeatist. And stops you-- likely a very smart person-- from contributing to the dialog of how to solve an extraordinarily complex problem and implementing some of those countless big and little things we can do to keep moving forward.
In the short term, but it may incentivize more local production chains in the future. A large part of the reason food is grown in such large, factory farm setting is because transport is a fraction of the cost of the food itself. As you say it's a complex problem and there aren't any simple solutions.
Yes, the purpose would be to reduce consumption of basically all things, since cheap fossil fuels are the basis of manufacturing and transporting almost all things. Hitting people hard would be a necessary effect of reducing carbon emissions, although wealth transfers from the rich to poor via taxation can modulate how much the poor are hit relative to the rich.
Raising fuel prices just fucks over the poor, and transfers wealth to the owners of the businesses they shop at who keep the same margin of a bigger pie.
One is excess fossil fuel consumption, causing people to be able to live further away then they should be if the goal is to reduce carbon emissions. It does not matter how rich the person consuming them is, total consumption needs to go down.
A separate problem is a rich person being able to consume far more fossil fuels than a poor person. This is solved by taking from the rich person and giving to the poor person.
There is no “fucking over”. Based on the amount that fossil fuel consumption needs to be reduced, everyone will need to feel pain while cities are rezoned, people’s expectations of how much space they have are changed, and hence, politically, there will never be a solution to fossil fuel usage without the advent of technology that replaces it.
How much do we have to sacrifice to the market before we'll admit that maybe we should consider other solutions?
If you simply set a carbon tax, overnight the whole market puts a huge effort in to lowering their environmental damage because now that damage has a number next to it and can be optimized for.
We can and should transition towards walkable and transit-connected apartments, but the problem there isn't a lack of demand.
The only viable solution within the timeframe humans had was to reduce fossil fuel consumption in total, from some combination of reducing per capita consumption and reducing population itself.
However, it is a prisoner’s dilemma, and there was never going to be unity in reducing everyone’s consumption and hence quality of life, especially not from the 80% of up and coming people around the world who are looking forward to enjoying life like the upper 20% have been.