Europe makes shipping vessels pay for carbon emissions

It's also insanely dangerous if it goes wrong.

There are definitely examples of where CCS is commercially viable [1], but implementation is lagging, and the technology is very unlikely to scale to capture the amounts that we are releasing. It would generally make better sense to keep the C in the geosphere than to first pump it up, burn and capture it again.

[1] https://research.chalmers.se/en/publication/531680

Not sure why you got downvoted.

Not emitting carbon is always going to be more effective than emitting then capturing carbon.

But most of green tech is a load of green washing (https://youtu.be/Zk11vI-7czE warning long video).

By most I mean non-nuclear, non hydro-electric.

Fact is that battery tech isn't up to task of high capacity highly reusable energy storage.

That’s the point - they have to pay the costs themselves, so if it turns out something isn’t important enough to be shipped at the ‘real price’ (including these externalities) then customers won’t pay for it. Instead of now, where everyone pays for it, and the real price is obfuscated.

Yes, the customers pay the tax, but the exporters and importers have to factor in the decreased demand (or margin) as the price has increased. And how they invest in the future.

And it goes to upstream businesses, if exporter Y has a lower tax basis, then they will pay rates approaching current exporter X.

Carbon tax supporters often advocates to redistribute the tax revenues equally to all citizen. That's how Canada does it.

It still penalizes polluters and raise the prices of the products emitting the most CO2 but it is a blank or positive operation for 80% of the population (and negative for the ~20% richest that are the polluting the most).

Look up carbon fee with dividends for more details.

Well, alternatively, everyone else in the world is paying for me to have cheap imported goods, especially the people I poorer countries who will suffer the worst from climate change. It seems fairer that I should bear the cost.

> Right, and who do you think will pay for this new tax?

Consumers, of course, but not indirectly, with such a diluted notion of responsibility as it is now (by paying for externalities through general taxes). It will be priced into the products, as it should be.

This way products that are "greener" will be cheaper and people will have an incentive to buy them.

I have no problem with companies profiting off of the products they sell, or end customers paying for the actual cost of the product. It's just that a market without externalities having a price tag isn't a well-designed "free market".

The price going up for such forms of shipping is the point.

So if a competitor figures out how to do the shipping cheaper due to it outputting less co2 (like trains running on electricity or just less polluting ships) those should over time win on the marketplace and shift the shipping industry to less pollution options.

edit: And the government can redistribute the carbon taxes to the part of the population this will hit the hardest easily by lowering VAT, income taxes at the lower end of progression or just direct subsidies.

Wouldn't the importer/exporter with less emissions have a competitive advantage? I think it's understood that citizens are paying a new tax to incentivize emission reduction by the companies.

1. It's pretty much a closed system. "EU governments", as much as "governments" is villainized, remain just an entity in the loop. That money is not going straight in the pocket of politicians. It's going in the budget. More revenue on this front means less to pull from somewhere else. Brocken as the electoral system is, all politicians still have a very big incentive if they want to keep their jobs to keep taxation low as they can. If anything by redistributing that money to people the most impacted, or by using it to sponsor incentive programs to reduce local carbon footprint.

2. Yep, prices for transported goods will surge, which is the intended consequence. If the general price of imported goods raises, then locally manufactured goods become more competitive. This gives an incentive for customers to select products built more closely to their place. It also gives a financial incentive for shipping companies to invest in cleaner transportation if they want to keep business.

3. Overall, yes this is scary, but think about it at a systemic level. This creates opportunities for local businesses and employers to sell more. This lowers the incentive to keep exploiting low-paid populations across the globe, potentially shifting the balance on their side to make social progress. And this reduces the carbon footprint, which we freaking desperately need.

We are already paying for it through bad air quality and climate change. It’s good that they feel that pain as well.

This line is brought out in every tax discussion.

Fundamentally, mainstream economics does not agree with your point of view. The bedrock of modern economic theory is clear on this: all prices are set by supply and demand.

Consumers pay the full tax burden only in the instance wherein demand is perfectly inelastic. Realistically, the more suppliers try to raise prices, the more consumers will shift to substitutes or demand less.

Ergo these taxes tend to fall on both consumers and suppliers, with the balance depending on the type of good and the market surrounding it.

good, if true then when they price their wares appropriately accounting for all thebpollution the free market will crush them with cleaner, cheaper, local alternatives or people will just not buy the product. i thought capitalists loved this free market stuff, or is it just the cheap oil from imperialism they love...

It does make local alternatives(without shipping) or shipping over land via rail more competitive.

> The first priority for life on this planet is to have a decent quality of life.

Yes. Unfortunately, you can't have a decent quality of life without a quality environment to live in.

Why does the economy take precedent over life itself?

You can’t have quality of life if you have no life at all.

Look at any recent studies about the projected cost of climate change in the decades to come or read a bit about the geopolitical consequences of what 2 degrees means.

The consequences of the response to Corona will seem like a nice a problem to have in comparison.

And contrary to a bad economic cycle, once the CO2 is in the atmosphere, there is no fixing it at a meaningful scale.

>The first priority for life on this planet is to have life

Fixed that for you.

> if we were to replace all of the world's fleet to be more energy efficient (which would almost by definition mean larger/longer ships, since they benefit from hydrodynamic efficiencies)

The hydrodynamic efficiencies are a small part of the problem, there are many other things that can be done. You don't need to scrap a perfectly good hull, you can simply choose to run slower, burn higher-quality fuels, or strap on an oxidation catalyst (DOC) to cut CO, particulate filter (DPF) to reduce particulate emissions, or add selective catalytic reduction (SCR) to reduce NOx emissions.

But until regulation and the market catch up, old ships will choose to run too fast, to burn whatever's cheapest, and to vent their exhaust directly into the atmosphere.

Gen III+ or earlier nuclear is a way of slowly solving 10% of the problem. It's not fast and it's limited by an irreplaceable critical mineral the overuse of which would delay full deployment of Gen IV in many scenarios.

It's not yet clear that Gen IV is faster or less limited by other critical minerals.

Dedicating your shipyards to building offshore wind cranes gets more carbon off the plate sooner than adapting it to build reactor vessels even if you only use the crane for a few years. Building more heavy casting is slow.

Every other step of the supply chain is even slower and more prone to overruns than the glacial pace of reactor construction.

Geoengineering is the last ditch emergency button. Once we hit it we can't unhit it and it might break other things.

You can see for yourself:

https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector

Shipping is 1.7% of global emissions while aviation 1.9%.

The immoral aspect is that jet fuel at the moment is literally tax free pretty much anywhere in the world. Not because of private jets but to prop up airlines from going insolvent. Not every 'fairness' discussion has to be a 'eat the rich' polarization.

If we are looking at % of emissions then all of this is a distraction, arguably the best bang for buck is to get energy storage + renewables and reduce energy from coal production. If we are looking at it from a social fairness aspect than jet fuel should absolute be taxed.

> But without an incentive like this the carbon capture tech will develop very slowly

I don't think that's a big issue. If the tech was economically viable it wouldn't be hard to lobby for such regulation. The positive net effect is easy to prove and argue for.

I think what's stopping carbon capture has more to do with the expected efficacy of it. I mean, when you have ~400 ppm CO2 in the air it's a bit like reassembling a broken glass. Sure, you can improve every process with engineering, but there are also physical boundary conditions that look pretty bleak for most forms of CC.

> even if we did decide to zero out our emissions and take the massive economic hit, it would still not account for the two centuries of CO2 buildup already in the atmosphere.

Perhaps one step at a time? We are absolutely nowhere near zero emissions, we don't even have a plan. Our entire civilization runs on hydrocarbons today. Nothing against CC research per se, but it doesn't look like a basket where we should put many eggs in.

The fatal flaw with this line of reasoning is that carbon capture is guaranteed (by entropy) to be energy negative. We aren't in an either or of zero out emissions or carbon capture. We need to zero out emissions *and* carbon capture. Large scale carbon capture is only viable with large excess amounts of renewable power.

Seems like a reasonable solution would be to make a market for a subset of emissions and increase it slowly over time. For example, you could require 0.1% be purchased in carbon markets in scale that number up over time as the carbon Market place grows and costs go down. It seems strictly better than a flat tax that goes into the general fund.

Perhaps if they never existed, but it would continue to exist as it is now without them.

I agree, but it seems like they're charging them for carbon, not for other emissions? If you want to cut down on carbon, taxing air freight seems like the way to go.

My concern is they're likely to redirect marine cargo to other modes which is going to be worse from a carbon intensity perspective.

The article you linked does not support your claim.

No.

Ready your own link, the top 16 ships produce more particulate emissions (sulfur and nitrogen oxides especially), because of low regulations and cost pressures driving the use of low quality fuels (bunker fuel).

And many local economies are no longer capable of producing anything meaningful at the prices "locals" can actually afford.

The goal is to punish companies that pollute not the people who consume the goods. In making polluting goods more expensive, you open up space for competition that uses fewer pollutants to offer similar goods at lower prices.

> It funnels huge fees to wall street and creates opportunities for financial manipulation. It is Clinton-era neoliberal grift. I thought the fiasco of energy de-regulation made people a bit more realistic about inserting Wall Street into the middle of everything[...]

Not saying you're wrong, but how does Wall Street capitalize from this? It looks more like a government money grab to me (if you want the cynical take), since the implementation is quite literally a tax.

That said, totally agree it's also an energy infrastructure problem – that governments have been incredibly stupid and naive with the last couple of decades.

That's the thing. We don't need R&D breakthroughs. We have infrastructure solutions today - they are just not cost effective for the suppliers because the free-market cost of carbon is $0.

Of course a carbon tax won't invent fusion - but I think it would be madness to make the case that people or industries don't adjust their consumption to adapt to taxes.

Keep in mind we have 30 years of data that shows cap and trade programs achieve their objectives and are pretty stinking cost effective.

Well you could dodge the tax by switching to sailing ships or the like, in fact I encourage companies to find ways to dodge those evil government tax men by switching to non-polluting forms of transportation. Stick it to big government!

Two effects here: First the substitution effect because the price gap narrows between other modes of transport which are less carbon efficient. Second, effect of switching to more efficient ocean cargo. The latter is quite small because fuel has been about 50% of the cost of ocean freight for a long time. The incentive for carbon efficiency has always existed for ocean freight.

It'll be interesting to see how it's gamed, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try - you will get things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP1Oq3JLNbc but they can be corrected for later.

One solution would be to switch the tax to a tariff on goods that can be avoided if you prove reduced carbon travel. So if your goods are from China, you get the 100% whatever it is, but if you can show that they travelled from China on whatever is considered acceptable, it drops to 20% or 0% or similar.

Thank you. You've expressed that really clearly. I feel your explanation is definitely missing from the article.

I wish I could say that Russia made a decision that contributed as well but that's like the frog blaming the scorpion.

To be fair though China is doing a lot of work to get to renewables. They are currently the largest producers of solar/nuclear/wind electricity: https://www.maxinomics.com/map/solar-electricity-generation

> Everyone praising this will wonder why the cost of everything has gone up once it’s implemented

People are not a bunch of idiots. Climate change is very real. Using other sources of energy requires investments. It is mandatory. All those are facts, as far as I know.

If your only arguments are "it will hurt the economy" and "people won't understand", you didn't take the measure of the problem and are part of it. That's very short-sighted, and tends to prove you don't really know what you are talking about.

"The other kids are doing bad things, we should do them"

Is that your argument? Because someone else is polluting we should?

Talking of India:

Indian coal magnate Gautam Adani goes green

> Asia’s richest man, coal magnate Gautam Adani, made his vast fortune betting on coal as an energy hungry India grew swiftly after its economy was liberalized in the 1990s

> He's now set his sights on becoming the world's biggest renewable energy player, by 2030, adroitly aligning his investments with the government’s own priorities.

> As India grapples with climate change, the Adani Group, whose operations also span ports, power, farming and defense manufacturing, plans to invest $70 billion in solar, wind and other green energy projects over the next decade.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/gautam-adani-ap-narendra-...

It seems your position that change can never happen - that no one should be an idealist as long as anybody else is not an idealist?

Then you should be happy as this policy will directly interfere with India's and China's exports to Europe, resulting in less demand for coal power and also less money for them to build coal plants.

California has one as well. It's not nearly as tight as Europe's but they want to get to that point in the next few years.