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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

Parking lots have lots of externalities not borne by the parking lot owner. This is an attempt to internalize some of those externalities to make the system more economically efficient. If this causes fewer parking lots to be built the system is more efficient, not less. Marginal parking lots shouldn't be built, only the ones that are truly needed.

OTOH, if a law causes fewer buildings to be built that imposes costs on society. It's harder to argue that a building that becomes infeasible due to the extra upfront costs of solar shouldn't be built.

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> This is an attempt to internalize some of those externalities to make the system more economically efficient.

What specific externalities are being internalized by solar panels? Or is this just a pigovian tax by forcing businesses to make money-losing investments?

Urban Heat Island effect for one. The dark pavement stores heat and raises the temperature of the surrounding area

Yes, this is a pigovian tax, using Pigou's definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax

Not the right wing hijack: https://taxfoundation.org/tax-basics/pigouvian-tax/

What's right-wing about the Tax Foundation's definition? It's basically the same as the Wikipedia definition.

It pretends that the costs will be borne by people outside of the transaction at all times, therefore continuing the right wing myth that any government intervention will increase costs for the final consumer.

Here is their definition: "A Pigouvian tax [...] is a tax on a market transaction that creates a negative externality, or an additional cost, borne by individuals not directly involved in the transaction."

The "additional cost" is a clarification of the "negative externality", not a condemnation of the "tax on a market transaction". I suppose it's ambiguously constructed as a sentence and we can read into it what we will.

Concrete accounts for something like 5% of CO2 emissions. So They want to use green energy reduce CO2 produced elsewhere in the system as an offset.

If you think the problem is carbon emissions, you should tax carbon emissions (ie. carbon tax). That way it covers everything, not just the ones that receive enough public attention, and there's an incentive to come up with greener paving materials. Right now you're forced to pay the same costs (ie. solar panel coverings) regardless if you're using concrete (max co2) or bricks (minimum co2?)

reminder this is a country where there were weekly riots in the streets when gas prices went up. (yellow vest movement)

A carbon tax would make sense. Let's not pretend this is easy and viable to implement.

I agree, law should be direct in what it is trying to do.

> forcing businesses to make money-losing investments?

Please be patient with this comment, I do not mean it as a personal accusation.

I do not think that the point of taxes and legislation is to make more money for businesses. The point of the economy is not to make money for people or businesses. The point of the economy and government is whatever we make it. We SHOULD use government and the economy to make things better for people. There are certainly disagreements about what this means.

"Forcing businesses to make money-losing investments" sounds like an accusation, like a sin, or like an evil thing to impose. Regulating business is not socialist or communist or evil.

>We SHOULD use government and the economy to make things better for people. There are certainly disagreements about what this means.

>"Forcing businesses to make money-losing investments" sounds like an accusation, like a sin, or like an evil thing to impose.

If you want businesses to pay more taxes (because of "their fair share" or whatever), that's fine. My only request is to call a spade a spade. If you think that businesses should be paying 1 billion euros more for climate change mitigation, enact a 1 billion euros tax. Raise corporate tax rates. Impose a levy on parking lots. Don't enact measures sound like not-taxes but are really taxes, like the legislation mentioned in the OP, or forcing them to donate to climate charities.

Sure.

Two thoughts

1. It is good to put solutions as close to problems as possible. I personally believe we should be spending billions on climate change, because we will eventually anyway, and we should soften that hit. It's hard to allocate that spending though. If you make that tax functionally dependent on the thing you want to change, then the problem and mitigation are coupled. This is emotionally pleasing, which should not be minimized.

2. My personal belief is that solar panels can be made to work by people who want them to work. I call this a marginal solution. The inverse is that if solar panels are forced to be installed by people who are not motivated to make them work, then they will not work. There are many ways that solar panels may fail to deliver usable energy, from shading to upkeep of inverters and connections to replacing damaged panels; if you don't believe in solar panels, you may not fix these problems.

Solar panels generally have a positive ROI.

Except it is lower or even negative right now over parking lots because of legislative barriers and because the process hasn't been streamlined.

If it is legally mandated rather than legally difficult, and everyone is doing it, these costs reduce.

By forcing everyone to do it you break the first-mover disadvantage. The lot owner (or whoever they want to license the space to) benefits. Cities get 25% lower heat-island effect. Customers get cooler cars. Less productive land is used.

Everyone wins, and the law has an 'economically untenable' clause for people in the shade of a highrise or with trees or existing shade sails or similar.

France is not the US, covered in car parks. Those large, open-air car parks are pretty much exclusively located at the out-of-town shopping areas/malls (say where your local Ikea is located, 'zones commerciales' in French like, for instance, this beauty [1]) and out-of-town large office campuses.

They are built because they are needed, and regulations do not make it easy to build more of them. They also do not really "impose costs" on society.

[1] https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@48.829154,1.9661837,3a,75y,21...

I would argue that they are not needed. In some country (ex: Turkey), commercial center / zone (but also big companies) operate their own bus services to allow their customer to come without car even when they are out of town and far from public transportation. Maybe that's an idea they should take.

Some (large) companies have bus services. Often that's to do the connection between a train station and their office.

But let's be honest and realistic: thousands and thousands of people are not going to squeeze into buses for hours to go shopping in places like the one I linked to, which are usually already served by public transport.

> Marginal parking lots shouldn't be built, only the ones that are truly needed.

Well, in France there are not enough parking spots already. Office buildings with less than a spot per 10 workers are the norm. Most old housing in cities don't offer any parking spot. It's not for nothing one of the ways to get started on the property ladder are parking spots.

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