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Comment by lovemenot | Hacker News Reader

Global warming is a global problem. While carbon tax would be levied locally, creating incentives to just shift production to low or no tax locations.

Just as harmonisation over Cororate Tax is finally emerging, similar cross-border agreements should be needed for a Carbon Tax.

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Which is why mechanisms like carbon tariffs on imports are being designed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_Border_Adjustment_Mecha...

That seems like it could become very messy and open to fraud. The nice thing about carbon tariffs within borders is they would be trivial to implement because there are relatively few targets (oil wells, coal mines, etc).

Most messy problems can't be solved by neat solutions. Without tariffs, countries will be incentivized to use lax emission control as a competitive advantage.

Yeah, you're right. We should just give up.

Do you think the natural game theoretic result might be "carbon havens"?

Areas that have the worst carbon enforcement / corruption (so issuing certificates to avoid tariffs etc without real action) would be more competitive than areas with effective enforcement so they will attract the most manufacturing.

I don't think importing from countries without a carbon price will be a problem (border taxes seem like they can work).

I suspect the problem will be that for countries that DO set a carbon price it is in everyone's interest within that country that the system not actually be effective.

If high levels of fraud are detected other countries can just slap high "emergency" tarriffs until the country fixes the problem. This would most certainly disincentivize lax enforcement.

The problem has always been lack of a will, not a way.

Perhaps this can work as strategic arms limitation treaties: trust but verify.

Satellite monitoring is almost at the point where an individual country may be held accountable for emissions from their territory.

As a country you also can enforce restrictions/taxes onto the whole supply chain, as a initial measure (can't be done by weak countries though).

Of course, mid term everyone should push for global carbon pricing models

Germany was the only country that seems to have understood this, given they were the only ones that advocated for it at COP.

> As a country you also can enforce restrictions/taxes onto the whole supply chain, as a initial measure…

Isn’t this an extremely hard problem, possibly unworkable, when trade is in assembled goods with complex, global supply chains?

Should be doable, see recent supply chain law of Germany regarding human rights

There's a problem between non-tariff measures and tariffs, with carbon taxing being too obviously a tariff measure. And you can't just throw in a tariff thanks to WTO rules, especially if it wouldn't apply to countries that do collect carbon tax - WTO requires that tariffs are applied the same to all countries except through certain bilateral trade treaties. Which is workable, but makes for considerable stumbling block in "quick apply" of carbon tax

EU is making carbon tariffs to prevent exporting emissions to avoid paying for carbon emissions outside EU Emissions Trading System.

Carbon tariffs are essential feature of any functioning system. Either countries enter agreement where they harmonize their carbon trade/tariff or there will be tariff.

it's complicated, but could tariffs help?

Tariffs might help in one respect. But they lack the market-driven simplicity and transparency which were the principal benefits of the carbon tax mentioned in the article.

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