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You don't necessarily need to enforce it globally.

Europe is currently working on a carbon adjustment mechanism which would deal with this kind of problems [1]. It is an extremely complex mechanism to build but it could address the main problem with local carbon taxation.

Even better: such mechanism, once implemented, could also be used to twist the arm of countries without a carbon tax of their own or countries are not committed to reduce their emissions by penalizing them harder than other countries.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_...

I wonder whether a carbon taxes with tariffs, from countries which don't have them, could solve this. Let's say a product get produced in China and imported into the EU. If it's not carbon-neutral, slap a tariff on.

> I wonder whether a carbon taxes with tariffs, from countries which don't have them, could solve this

That sounds perfect actually but how do you plan to actually check. China will can just lie, but I guess if they do get caught lying there can be penalties.

Make the companies importing the products responsible with heavy fines. I assume it would take a week until there are multiple companies run and overseen by non-Chinese employees which would certify how much carbon was created during production.

Kinda, but you need to set the incentives right. Both the importer and the overseas manufacturer will have the incentive to underreport the emissions and overreport the paid carbon tax (China could easily collect it on paper, and then offer some rebates).

So you would need to bring together the board of local manufacturers interested in making imports prohibitively expensive, and a board of importers interested in making local production economically unviable. And you would need to have a process where they would need to come out with a compromise satisfying both parties. Both parties should have respect for each other and be willing to find a middle ground. That's how democracies work, that's why U.S. managed to become the #1 economy.

Except, this mechanism is broken. Whoever owns the media can point the finger at the prospective manufacturer, scream "climate change denier" and the public won't listen. Because the public sentiment is that some opinions, depending on the identity/affiliation of their sources, are just too dangerous to be heard. And this is heavily abused by those who know how to play the system.

The public gets screwed long-term. It's already prohibitively expensive to raise kids in the U.S. (good luck competing against 5-people-per-room countries), it's unviable for most people to have retirement savings, or even own their place of residence. But the public doesn't connect it with the fact that the remaining local jobs have zero economic leverage and are made to easily replace people on a whim. We keep screaming at the next "enemy of the people" and stubbornly refuse to notice how wealth and economic leverage is being siphoned away from us.

While it's true, I think you're going too extreme with "only makes sense if it's applied and enforced globally and uniformly". This still applies pressure, because: a) importing takes time and money - it's not a free solution, b) there's some limit to what China can take in terms of pollution - at some point they will have to respond even if the threshold is way higher than in the us.

> The whole concept of emission standards and carbon taxes only makes sense if it's applied and enforced globally and uniformly. If an extra tonne of CO2 costs $1 in U.S. and $0 in China, the incentive isn't to reduce pollution - the incentive is to move business to China.

Yeah, but the point is to get it in some places and then in other places later. Leading by example. Also, there are many things that can't be done abroad.

> Europe has been playing the blind green eye politics for a decade - all pretending to be green and environmentally friendly, while in fact largely replacing locally sourced coal with imported Russian gas.

I don't understand what you're saying because natural gas is much better than coal. This is pretty well known... The point is that it's temporary until actual renewables are rolled out.

You seem to want everything to be perfect already and hand-wave away any improvement whatsoever. I agree they're going way to slow but it's incorrect to say we've made no progress and that all of this is worthless.

It has to start somewhere.

> Yeah, but the point is to get it in some places and then in other places later. Leading by example. Also, there are many things that can't be done abroad.

Leading by example in this context would be continuing to meet demands domestically while doing The Hard Work of cleaning up the processes.

Instead the example being set is to simply perform the same (or worse) dirty process somewhere else and make it someone else's problem in the short-term.

You didn't address anything I said. Someone has to go first. Simultaneity is impossible. Some production cannot be exported. They did improve by moving from coal to gas. You're just hand-waving all this away.

This is talking about actual carcinogens, not CO2. Over 100,000 Americans die due to pollution every year, and it would be even higher if we didn't outsource our manufacturing. This is one of the reasons why China stopped accepting plastic waste imports. It's impossible to recycle lower grade plastic economically without causing a lot of health problems.

Um. Emissions standards make a huge difference locally. CO2 is not the only pollutant.

You are going to move the natural gas to China?

Agreed, it's unfortunate these points get drowned out by: "but, but per capita emissions! Fairness! 'Developing countries'!"