Many people have hobbies that drive CO2 emissions. Should we ban all of these too?
Is there a cost? I would say it is priceless - because we do not have any mechanism to funnel that money into undoing the CO2. And no, planting trees are not the opposite of taking oil from deep underground. Once that oil is out it remains in the above-surface carbon cycle. While it is underground it would never even be part of it. So any price would be made up - and just funneled to some interest group. The "compensation" does not actually compensate anything. This is the danger of only thinking in "money". I paid, problem magically solved!
I don't get that? If do adopt a carbon tax, then the rich guy who wants to drive a performance car pays a lot more, than the poor person who take the bus.
> If you have a high polluting performance vehicle, maybe it can be restricted in a normalizing fashion when used for transportation or recreation within some arbitrary boundary, like speed limits to some extent [...]
That sounds awfully intrusive and full of loopholes, that only people who can afford expensive lobbyists and lawyers can exploit.
> [...] but some people shouldn't have the ability to just disregard things in daily in daily life that the place has democratically decided upon only because the money is available.
How would paying your democratically-decided-on carbon tax be the same as disregarding anything?
But the poor guy with a beat 20 year old car in a badly insulated rental pays more than the rich guy with his Tesla and energy neutral villa.
That's just needless paperwork, and never catches all use cases. Eg the guy who walks doesn't get an electric car subsidy. Or the guy who practices hypermiling on his ICE, vs the guy who drives his ICE like a maniac. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermiling
Much easier to just apply an emission tax (or a cap-and-trade program) and let people figure it out by themselves without extra paperwork and government favouritism.
If you want to do redistribution to help the poor, the impact of the overall tax system is important. You don't need to make every single tax progressive.
Individual taxes, especially sin taxes, should be designed to do their job as efficiently as possible.
Unless you’re suggesting we tax the cheap option, in which case you’re saying the same thing.
The weighted average price per ton for carbon credits from forestry and land-use projects that reduce emissions or remove carbon from the atmosphere has been on a steady upward path, rising from $4.33 per credit in 2019 to $4.73 per credit so far in 2021, with a spike to $5.60 per credit in 2020.
So, spend $35/year or if you want to get fancy, the cost of 1 tank of gas per year to offset your carbon footprint from driving and enjoy a guilt-free year.
Or we could fold that cost into gas, if you use 1 tank a week, 10/gallons a tank, that would be less than $0.02 as a carbon tax credit.
I would be all for that.
But, if you raised the price of gas $0.50 and funneled all of that money into funding carbon capture industries, I would also be all for that, and at that price point more people would search for public transportation or purchase EV's so that is a double win.
But then again, these taxes would disproportionately affect the middle and lower classes in suburban and rural communities so that would make life far more difficult on people who already have it tough enough and manufacturers would probably shovel any taxes you put on them directly to the consumers as well, so I would say it's almost as if there isn't a single simple fix to the issue and only a multipronged approach that takes into account dozens of moving variables rolled out over time is the only viable solution.
Pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere might or might not be a good idea. But that's a cost/benefit analysis that's independent of the carbon tax take.
Consider what job it's doing, not what arbitrary market category it fits in.
I agree this is a thing that can be done, but I disagree it's a job that it's doing - because stating its a job usually means there is some ultimate purpose to it.
Also a more specific issue here is car manufacturing itself is like 25% of the carbon footprint of a vehicle, so regardless of use it's still doing damage.
[1] e.g. a solution may be that we take public transport, or micromobility, or relocate so we don't need to drive as far, or videoconference, or any number of other things that examine the full range of options we have to reach the goal.
No it doesn’t. That is what authoritarians do under the guise of climate change when they just want control.
Climate change demands we reduce CO2 in aggregate. It is better to tax all gas equally to force a reduction in its use and keep increasing the tax until its emissions are negligible. No exceptions, full stop.
Just do a gas tax (or carbon tax) and be done with it. If you are worried about some specific use cases, just give those deserving people money so they can pay their taxes with that.
Being faster? Being more fun? Giving you social status in your in-group?
Come on. Gas taxes are hilariously regressive. The people—ALL the people—who can afford this kind of dumbass vehicle and who are willing to commit the offense of buying and operating it will never, ever be affected or restricted or motivated by any piddly gas taxes.
So, no. No. Of course it's not actually accomplished by gasoline taxes. That's a fantasy.
If you made gas taxes 1-2 orders of magnitude more progressive than they are right now, that would be a tiny start.
The people who can afford 272k for a car are a vanishingly small percentage of the world population. In this category of people wasting money, this is one of the least impactful activities. For comparison, they might also consider chartering a jet to the Alps for skiing, renting a yacht for a week in the Mediterranean, going on African safari, etc.
> So, no. No. Of course it's not actually accomplished by gasoline taxes
You do know there is a point where gas taxes can be raised high enough that it just pays for full carbon offset/capture, right? At that point you’re just having a fit that rich people exist, which has nothing to do with solving climate change.
As with most ad valorem (or fixed per unit) consumption taxes, because consumption as a share of income declines with increasing income, so total and marginal tax share drops with greater income.
Calling these taxes regressive just a socially acceptable way for people to say “I don’t want to shoulder any burden for this”.
Yes, sales taxes and VATs are regressive, though in many cases that is made somewhat more nuanced by selective exclusion of basic necessities on which the poor focus a disproportionate share of consumption; when that's done, they are progressive at the low end shifting to regressive higher. This kind of tax that puts it's heaviest burden somewhere between the above average income segment of the working class and the petit bourgeois middle class is somewhat more popular than straight regressive taxation (when you take into account payroll taxes and favorable taxation on LTCG and certain other income disproportionately concentrated among the very rich, US taxes on income also largely break this way).
> Calling these taxes regressive just a socially acceptable way for people to say “I don’t want to shoulder any burden for this”.
Er, no. I actually favor heavier gas taxes (or carbon taxes) as a pigovian tax, but I think that the overall system of taxation should be asjusted so the net effect is not to to decrease progressivity (which, given that I have above average income, probably means I shoulder the burden of that as well as of the additional gas tax, so really the opposite of what you suggest). An individual tax desirable for other reasons being regressive is an addressivle issue.
If you want to project your biases against poor people onto others, fine, but let's be clear that that's what you are doing.
Read my comment again. I didn’t say they weren’t.
> If you want to project your biases against poor people onto others
Are you calling my criticism of armchair economists a bias against poor people? Do you know that most armchair economists are not poor people?
But in any case, I don't think it matters too much whether individual taxes are progressive or regressive or flat. That consideration only really makes a difference for the overall tax system. Individual taxes can be designed to be as efficient as possible, as long as the overall system is as progressive/flat/regressive as desired.
Just so we're clear, punishing them would involve, say, jailing them or confiscating all but $50k or so of their net worth and then making them work at Burger King for a month or two. That would be punishing.
Asking for a more progressive and fair tax system does not "punish" anyone.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-food-climate-obesity/obes...
Internalizing the externalities refers adding an additional cost to the purchase price to cover for the externality. In the example above for the pollution machine, this could be a carbon tax or a carbon offset.
Hobbies that harm other people by polluting are not a "necessary evil". They are not necessary.
For example, in many cities in the world it's illegal to have a bonfire because it makes people (unwillingly) inhale toxic particulate.