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Comment by Factorium | Hacker News Reader

The best solution to climate change is a price on Carbon.

Anything else is just pork.

If we don't want to impose a carbon price on ourselves, we can do it to others via import tariffs.

I disagree: It might be part of the solution, but simply taxing carbon means that rich folks or companies can pollute. We need green methods put into law to force folks to cut their emissions and pollutants - and punish those who run afoul of the laws, including steep fines, possible business shutdowns, and personal liability/criminal charges for CEOS and other folks running the company, especially if they cover up their polluting.

I'd much rather just deny good that do not meet standards. Again, tariffs just make it so moneyed folks can just pay to avoid stuff.

Exactly this.

We are seeing Bill Gates telling us HOW to save the planet for being the biggest person polluter but he CAN buy carbon credit to offset his carbon footprint. Hypocrite!

When you put it like that, buying carbon credit seems a lot like paying indulgences.

Carbon taxes basically do that though. They "fine" you if you use more carbon than your competitors, disadvantaging you in the market.

Tax evasion is already a crime, and would be difficult for most people since it would be embedded into the things they buy in a million little ways. But each supplier has their own direct incentive to change that to stay conpetitive.

There's room for other policies too, the whole "if you dont do carbon taxes youre not serious about climate change" thing seems like a bait and switch by politicians who have already poisoned the well on taxes generally. (And people generally seem ignorant that carbon pricing is an integral part of action on climate change around the world).

A company can simply decide to pay the carbon tax, though.

Actual penalties mean that you are actually risking your company if you don't comply. Fines are different if the folks in charge have to pay some as well, for example, and/or if they are a significant portion of profit (percentage of profit is a harder hit than a flat carbon tax that you can plan for if you would like). After fines? Jail times for those in charge and closing/auctioning off your business.

Carbon taxed don't do these things, and I'm not a believer in the market taking care of this since carbon taxed don't actually make anyone get more efficient than their competitors, who are only likely to get efficient if it is profitable. Carbon taxes themselves aren't likely to do this.

The differences are on the margins... many activities become unprofitable or less profitable if you have to pay carbon tax. Many fuel sources (e.g. coal) become uneconomical, so people switch. I don't see any issue with rich people polluting.

Carbon tax is like LVT - we have commons (ability of the ecosystem to "absorb" emissions), we have to split it up somehow, what better way than to price them in a manner where only the amount that can be sustainably used, is used? People who can make the best use of the capacity, or are willing to burn money on it, will buy it up.

Lots of industries are low margin (the natural state of competitive markets) and cannot simply pay the carbon tax and act like nothing happened. They can pass the price along, and that will hurt these industries according to how elastic their customers’ demand is. So at least we’d be emitting carbon for the things markets deem more useful.

It may not be a total solution, but it’s a first step. Too many climate activists have this brinksman “no but” approach to changing the course of the political ship of climate change (see nuclear power discussion above), when we really need “yes and” even if the first steps aren’t perfect or big enough. Yelling at people to make drastic changes has never convinced even honest skeptics.

How do you justify pricing carbon when governments subsidies for fossil fuels are billions of dollars annually?

Most changes work better if there's a ramp or taper. Phasing out subsidies is a good idea and possibly worth doing in parallel but carbon fees will directly affect those industries in a very direct way so it kind of cancels out.

I'm possibly reading too much into your question but carbon dividends that let everyone spend the money raised on what they need to do to adjust are a sensible part of any plan. Taxes are a very useful and soohisticated government tool, and in America certain groups have relentlessly attacked both taxes and government intervention as things that are harmful. (The exact same people arguing that tobacco, global warming, lead paint, corporate funding of politicians etc. are not bad for you)

Also, I fail to see how carbon tax collected in the U.S. for wasteful lifestyle is going to be distributed to, say, Ethiopia, with a same-order-of-maginitude population (115M vs 329M) and ~1/150 emissions per capita (according to [1]).

Without scaling back the unsustainable rich American lifestyle, this tax will have limited domestic impact, while punishing developing countries trying to catch up via more polluting industries. Which is perfect for maintaining the world order where the majority of human beings work and live in subpar conditions to support the unsustainable lifestyles of a small minority, I suppose.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...

Westerners are actually much more efficient in terms of scientific, economic, cultural output per unit of CO2, compared to developing nations.

Ethiopia can benefit from the renewable energy technology developed in the West, and skip fossil fuels entirely.

If the cost of a carbon credit is higher than the cost of sequestration, and sequestering operations generate credits, then in essence by paying for carbon credits you are paying to clean up your emissions.

And preferably tax carbon as close to the source as possible (crude oil). Because leaving oil in the geound is so much easier than putting it back in.

I don't get why everyone talks about carbon instead of fossil fuels. The carbon that's already in the atmosphere cycles through it but doesn't change it. The carbon that gets dug up from the ground gets added to the atmosphere. It seems to me that what we really need to do is stop mining fossil fuels, and e.g. incentivize biofuels. If we tax carbon we also make biofuels more expensive, while in the grand scheme of things they seem to be basically climate neutral?

Its just a shorthand. Most actual policies include gasses other than carbon dioxide (which is different from carbon anyway) and account for things that absorb or emit carbon in other ways (e.g change in land use).

The low hanging fruit is to stop digging up fossil fuels and burning them though and as such theyll be impacted most by "carbon" fees.

I think carbon is the wrong thing. We need to go after pollution. People understand pollution, it’s plastic in the lake, or smog in the sky, people don’t understand “carbon” but garbage on the ground is something we can do something about.

Climate change is the wrong term. We need to fight a war on pollution.

Pollution and global warming are two separate things we both need to prevent. We do not need to choose, we can and should address both. In Western countries pollution is generally better contained/addressed/regulated than in poorer countries, however Western countries contribute hugely more greenhouse gasses (certainly per capita, and especially US and AUS) than poorer countries. So no, carbon is not the wrong thing. It is the primary, singularly most important things we should address. And indeed, as long as we don't put a properly high prico on it one way or the other we are just fooling around and making the earth that much less inhabitable for our children

I really wish people would stop thinking that there's this one thing that will fix climate.

There isn't. It'll take lots of things. Carbon pricing is a good one if done right, but it's not a silver bullet. There are no silver bullets.

Why is it not a silver bullet?

The primary (only even) cause of the climate crisis is the fact that we have burnt and continue to burn a ton of carbon and emit it as CO2 in the atmosphere. And as most of the world functions with some form of capitalism, it makes a lot of sense to put a price on something to make it less desirable. In fact it makes so much sense that until we have put a significant price on fossil carbon use we cannot tell our children that we really tried to do something to prevent this crisis.

Like a carbon coin ? That you get once you have proven you took out some CO2 from the atmosphere.

Like in the ministry of future novel: https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-coin-climate-change-cryp... ?

Shouldn't it include methane? Methane is far more potent green house gas than Co2.

Fact: bears eat beets. Bears, beets, "Battlestar Galactica."

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