I think it's an important debate to have though
Sequestration is the opposite. Plant a tree and claim 2 tons of credit, then chop it down and claim it again next year. LOL.
The reason there are no trees somewhere is never "nobody planted them". It's either "somebody cut them and does something to prevent them growing back" or "the land isn't good for trees".
So planting the trees is never the solution. Buying farming land and reserving it for forest (that will grow by itself) is much more efficient.
Do you really think that in a world where every law is rife with carve outs and loopholes for specific industries, a world where states peddle liquor and gambling because sin taxes fund things they like, that a carbon tax would not be gamed? Of course not. The societal cohesion and political process to produce results that are not highly gamed, tilted or rigged simply does not exist, or at least it doesn't exist.
Your opinion that a carbon tax will "just work" in reality as it does in theory is predicated on sufficient amounts of ignorance that the distinction between ignorance and malice is no longer meaningful.
Everything is gamed, so you try and make your incentives as simple and direct as possible.
If the goal is reducing carbon emissions, you tax carbon emissions. Any other incentive is more indirect, less efficient and more gamable.
> you just end up accomplishing nothing other than regressively taxing the entire population.
Pick one. If it accomplishes nothing, it's not an effective tax either.
Current startups are targeting $100 / ton (within a factor of two), which translates to $1/gallon of gas.
Personally, I think the carbon tax should be 2x that until we are back to preindustrial levels.
> There won’t be a single perfect solution to the problem of concrete. One potential advancement is green concrete, which is decarbonized by changing the recipe, production process or longevity. Another is to capture emitted carbon at cement plants and store or reuse it.
Scroll down to the bit about ETH Zürich's research and there's some interesting stuff beyond the long opening about history.
> Block’s early research was focused on heritage architecture — vaulted cathedrals and other historic structures. “Our modern engineering tools are quite inadequate in explaining how safe these buildings are,” he said. Sometimes, he went on, digital engineering models of old buildings concluded that there should be no way they could still be standing, that they should’ve collapsed centuries ago. But there they were, solid, unmoving. Maybe, Block thought, there was something wrong with the models.
Therefore whoever creates the model must choose a priori which features should be included in the model, because it is believed that they influence the results. and which features should be ignored, because it is believed that they have negligible influence.
Any kind of physical model must be validated by comparison with experiments.
It is extremely frequent to discover that the model does not match the experiments, which means that the a priori judgments about what can be neglected have been wrong. In such cases, the assumptions on which the model is based must be reviewed and some of the decisions about what features should be included in the model should be reversed.
This is the normal way of working with any models, so the fact that the first attempt of modeling the ancient vaults has failed, does not say much, except that those who had made that initial attempt either did not understand well the behavior of certain rocks under compressive stresses, or they did not understand well how the building techniques used by the old masters redistributed the stresses in the rocks composing the vaults.
The article does not explain which was the problem with those wrong models, but then it mentions that the team of Block has applied the traditional method of stone masonry, of making structures which are under compressive stresses, instead of bending stresses, like in a flat floor or ceiling, to design floors that need much less concrete than the conventional floors.
This seems like a very obvious method, which should have already been used if good, so I wonder if the comparison about the concrete consumption was made at equal usable interior spaces. The main reason why flat floors and ceilings have been preferred in modern multi-level buildings was to provide interior spaces that can be completely used, without being partially blocked by structural elements (e.g. if the ceiling is a vault, you cannot put at a wall a cabinet raising up to the ceiling, but only up to the height where the curved part of the vault joins the vertical walls; if the vault has ribs, those impose additional constraints).
Let's ditch "the thing" -- "Carbon Tax", because "the thing" has certain assumptions behind it -- like political party X or Y believes or is skeptical of climate change/carbon taxes/etc. So I'm going to just call it a Concrete Tax. You can make the connection that it's a carbon offset, is way more sophisticated than a tax ... For most citizens, "Concrete Tax" is how it's going to be experienced/understood, anyway (and for a lot of them, that might be a good thing if you support the tax).
So we start at "Government applies or increases the tax levied per (unit) of (concrete) sold (at specific supply chain point)." Your problems begin with the things in parenthesis, but let's say you've gotten them right. The arms race begins.
It isn't this simple, but as it relates to this topic, it's good enough to think of "a cement business" as a for-profit publicly traded company who -- like every for-profit publicly traded company -- has a responsibility not to keep the customer happy, not to make good products, not to help the environment, not to make the C-level executives or the employees wealthy or really do anything other than "to make money for its shareholders (owners)".
The goal of the government by levying a "Concrete Tax" is to coerce the corporation into altering its behavior -- either replacing "concrete" with "green concrete" or using something "more green", entirely -- by increasing the cost.
First, you have to look at the market. Advances have been made and are being made in to make concrete more green, more durable, and superior to other products for more purposes (both in durability and environmental impact). Really, you're seeing a diversity of products that trade-off different strengths and fit better for narrower purposes. The article didn't conclude that "things are A-OK" but reading where things are and understanding that "the pace of technology is always accelerating", we can expect that "left alone we'll have better products, anyway". Apply the tax and "the current producers" start to consolidate. It's likely the next product isn't "I Can't Believe It's Not Concrete", but rather "Concrete 2.0 -- twice as strong with 10% of the Carbon!" It's possible you make it hard to enter the market to "provide a solution" because of the closer association of the hypothetical "Concrete 2.0" and the cursed/taxed Concrete.
Once the "arms race" begins, the taxed business is rarely left with "do what the government wanted me to do". Frankly, they didn't just come out and ban it, they went the subversive route by applying a fine (sorry, tax) to the product so it's hard to judge them for not playing by the same rules. They'll start poking at "the definition of concrete"; the exclusive goal being to find "something that is taxed less" with "how well it appears environmentally" being one of many (and only as high as it must be) variables ranked according to cost/need. The common approach is to move the problem somewhere else in the supply chain where people aren't paying as much attention (kick the can down the road).
The "avoid the tax by importing it" approach is a favorite. This usually falls into the pattern of "this or that trade agreement forbids the US from taxing the imports, so we'll just stop making it over here and import it from there" or "it's taxed regardless, but they'll make it over there for half the price because they just get to pour the byproducts onto the neighbor's land", either way -- add "moving the stuff" to the environmental impact. Maybe while the bill was being written, the Concrete Lobby had "their guy" get some language in there to make sure only a component that makes up a 10% of the final product is what's actually being taxed. The regulators liked it because it's easier to track, the industry liked it because if they just import that part, that'll lower how much has to be moved. There's a loophole somewhere that'll require further adjustments to the regulation/law. In the meantime, R&D budgets are increasingly being spent on working around the tax.
In an ideal world, that "tax money" would go to a magical entity who's sole purpose would be "to create solutions to the problems concrete solves which have less environmental impact." In the US, it would be worse than "vaporized", it would go to organizations which would spend that money adding oversight/administrative burden and creating jobs that will make it a lot harder to solve the problem (once it's solved, what do we do with all of the regulators...?). Even if that organization existed and worked, the cost to transfer the money from "the business" to "that research organization" will see pennies on the dollar make it to "actually solving the problem."
I'm sorry if this sounds combative or hostile -- it's difficult to express a different opinion and avoid "sounding like a bit of a dick." I wouldn't have wasted the time, though, if I wasn't open to hearing where I'm getting it wrong. It's a difficult thing to argue, as well, because I can't say "OK, give me an example of something that was taxed which accelerated advancement/adoption of a preferred technology that worked better than just letting the preferred technology stand on its own" because once you tax it, you lose the ability to measure the result untaxed. I think the EV tax credit might be a good example of a tax that will turn out to have not been worth the cost. I think once Li-Ion technology reached the point that it was realistic to use in replacement of an ICE, the many, many other benefits beyond "the price of gas" and "smog/pollution." I decided 4 years ago my next car would be an EV, I had no idea what the tax credit was then -- gas/pollution/the tax credit were not factors for me. My factors were convenience of filling up at-home, maintenance, overall simplicity, electronic features, and performance. Any two of those being radically better than ICE and I'm buying electric at a 25% premium. Add to it that my driving patterns have evolved that even the lowest-range EV available in the US would ideally fit my needs, and owning an ICE vehicle stops being a "baseline" and you start seeing all of the inconveniences pile on. Now, in 1999 when GM produced the EV-1 using a $40,000 battery that was in (most ways) worse than an ICE-based vehicle, there wouldn't have been any amount of green points" that would have gotten all but the wealthiest among us to buy one. The tech was so far* from being ready that even were it offered at competitive prices it would have been dismissed.