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Comment by espadrine | Hacker News Reader

I also don’t think it is sarcasm, but I don’t think it is reasonable.

> We should tax the hell out of every ounce of carbon emitted and use money from this tax to pay basic income so that people are able to live with increased prices.

So far so good.

> Free market will sort the rest out

Under free market, the basic income will cause a further price increase, rendering the effort moot.

Subsidizing energy, as Kosovo and Kazakhstan have been doing (resulting in the same consequences on coin mining and crackdown), is necessary, and thus so are the consequences.

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No it doesn’t. Example, imagine you currently have a energy bill of $1000p.a. With the proposal above, we’ll move you to a $3000p.a. bill with CO2 taxes. And, we’ll give you $2000p.a. to compensate for the increased energy bill.

Would you really just keep paying more for energy because you have that? The payback period on solar panels just went *0.3, batteries just became a affordable option for day/night balancing, many alternative investments in renewable energy just became profitable.

Many people will use that opportunity to get ahead financially. I think that’s what GP meant with “the free market will sort out the rest”

I’m not exactly sure we are disagreeing.

> we’ll give you $2000p.a. to compensate for the increased energy bill. Would you really just keep paying more for energy because you have that?

In the suggested policy I was replying to, the $2k would decrease if I (and many others) switched to renewable. That loss would muddy the gains, discouraging the switch. Besides, the methods you are describing tend to have high upfront costs.

Hence, the need for subsidizing instead, something very close, but without a negative-feedback-loop incentive.

To be fair, while that is a reasonable policy (and why so many countries enact it), I would favor requiring each company to be individually carbon-neutral, with an exponential penalty. As a result, it is not a tax which could weaken the vulnerable, and yet it forces companies to choose between reducing their negative externalities, and bankruptcy.

But computing carbon-neutrality is hard.

Maybe not that far apart. The challenge with subsidies is the administration and making sure you exhaustively subsidize different options. It’s also infeasible for smaller investments such as radiator foil.

My underlying assumption is that you would reduce the 2k compensation in my example. So the incentive for any saving remains.

On duration: I installed solar for 0.80€ (ex vat) per Wp (which generates about 1kWh p.a.). In NL electricity rates recently spiked to 0.45 euro per kWh. Based on that, payback time is now less than 2 years (that includes everything, panels, inverter and installation, etc.)

but I think we agree the challenge is to find a way to create a good market incentive for consumers and industry to reduce their externalities/CO2.

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