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Comment by collegeburner | Hacker News Reader

no its purpose is to fix an externality. it should be exactly equal to the cost of carbon offset for the amount emitted. or better yet license anybody to do carbon capture and require presenting a certificate of equal carbon removed. start at like 1/8 emissions removal and go up over time.

if you care about stopping carbon emissions i think this is the most realistic and efficient way. otherwise we get caught up in discussions of how this changes redistribution and "economic/environmental justice" or whatever and it will never happen. but unfortunately there are many people who care more about adding more free stuff or using the funds for more dumb congress policies then actually passing a carbon policy.

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>>A proper carbon tax would only increase flight costs by about 8%

>no its purpose is to fix an externality. it should be exactly equal to the cost of carbon offset for the amount emitted.

So it would only cost 8% of the cost of a flight to completely remove all the carbon emitted from that flight? That seems pretty reasonable. How is this done?

By causing a reallocation of resources everywhere else - Fossil fuels would only be used where there is no alternative. A carbon tax won't completely kill them off, but it will cause anyone who can to switch away.

So it's incentive for someone to not take a flight? I would assume travel has a certain degree if inelasticity in demand which would cause the tax to be much less effective in actually reducing emissions. The only way for this to actually reduce emissions is if someone decided to not travel at all and just stay home. If they decided to go by car, I assume that would be worse (180 passengers don't take a flight but drive instead). I mean if you have to go to your grandmother's funeral 5 states away, you gotta go. If you have to go on a business trip, you have to go. What's the estimated percentage of carbon emissions would an 8% tax reduce? I guess this is aimed at leisure travel primarily.

This seems like one of those things that sound right on a macro level, but doesn't take into account the inelastic demand of travel. For it to actually reduce emissions (the goal), the tax would probably need to be much, much higher to the point where you just don't go to grandma's funeral.

Honestly, for me, the TSA and the actual flight experience in the US as kept me from flying at all since about 2006. I can't stand any part of it. I don't care much for driving either and only put around 2000 miles a year on my vehicle. Most of this is because I can work at home. I guess I've got a pretty low footprint.

> For it to actually reduce emissions (the goal), the tax would probably need to be much, much higher to the point where you just don't go to grandma's funeral.

Nah, you just need enough pressure to move people onto electric cars.

A plane might be one of the last holdouts on fossil fuels, but even then renewable fuel shouldn't be that expensive in bulk.

> it should be exactly equal to the cost of carbon offset for the amount emitted

If it's to fix an externality, then it specifically should be exactly equal to the cost of that externality - that is, sufficient to compensate for all damages (and repairs for said damages) resulting from that externality. This should be right around the same as a carbon offset, but it's worth remembering why a carbon tax is necessary: not for the mere sake of punishing some dirty activity, but for the specific sake of compensating the victims of reckless negligence.

Which doesn't really work as a concept when there are things so terrible that no amount of money can compensate. What price would you put on human extinction?

> Which doesn't really work as a concept when there are things so terrible that no amount of money can compensate.

Well yeah, but surely some compensation is better than the current status quo of nothing at all.

> What price would you put on human extinction?

Well, if we want to get hyper-capitalist about it: whatever the resulting opportunity cost is from those humans no longer being able to produce value. Of course, seeing as how humans can produce other humans who then produce value and yet more humans and so on in perpetuity, that opportunity cost rather quickly approaches infinity.

Exactly, that's what I'm saying, the cost should be exactly equal to what it costs to fix it. The most efficient way to do that is allow anybody to get certified to fix that externality and require proof that the person who caused it also paid to get it fixed. This makes it easier than trying to determine what the current price of remediating is. Markets work really well at some things and this is one.

This exact issue helped kill Washington state’s twice proposed carbon tax initiative.

They just passed an entirely equivalent law though, so clearly it wasnt fatal.

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