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Comment by tetromino_ | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused about why this is unexpected or controversial.

The point of money is to be able to buy, rent, or experience things. Virtually all things that can be bought, rented, or experienced require energy as input. Usually, the nicer, more prestigious, and more expensive the thing, the more energy. So saying that "rich households emit much more carbon than poor ones" is largely synonymous with saying that "rich households spend much more money than poor ones" which is largely synonymous with "rich households are much richer than poor ones".

Water is wet, sky is blue.

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When the CO2 tax was introduced in Germany you could see people make ridiculous statements like how rich people with their electric cars and heat pumps and so on have 0 tons of emissions and the CO2 dividend of roughly 75€ per year is therefore primarily benefitting a handful of rich people.

You can't make this up yet there is a ridiculous number of people believing this.

The CO2 dividend works like this. If you emit an average amount of CO2, then you effectively pay nothing. If you emit less, you get more money than you pay in. If you emit more than the average, you pay in. By this arrangement the vast majority of people either get some money back, pay nothing or only pay a little and the rich pay a lot.

The problem is with doing the accounting for this… wouldn‘t we need a separate price for everything we buy for every product on the market?

No, the carbon tax is applied where carbon is produced, which is mostly fuel and energy consumption, and the resulting increase in costs affects the market prices of goods as usual.

Well you wouldn‘t be able to find out if you‘re above or below average then.

It's because they're unaware and need to be made aware.

Rich folks focus on certain things like reusable straws or driving a Tesla and think they're doing the world a favor while they consume 2000x the natural resources. Things like a plaid tesla or electric hummer are selling the appearance of environmentally friendliness, not the reality.

The point of this is to call people out on their hypocrisy, keep people honest, and to keep people in the real world.

I don't see hypocrisy, I see disingenuous criticism. Driving a Tesla is objectively less bad for the environment than driving a Range Rover. So if you buy a Tesla, you are using less carbon than your peer rich folks.

But if you are rich, you by definition command a greater share of society's resources, which means more energy and more carbon emitted. You live in a bigger house. Plus a summer villa and a mountain chalet. And a large formal garden with thirsty plants. And a pool. Of course you have more furniture, more clothes. Cars and boats, maybe a plane. You play sports requiring high-tech equipment and expensive-to-maintain facilities. You travel for leisure, and when you travel, you pay to have lots of elbow room, spending carbon to transport empty air. You go in person to plenty of concerts, conferences, matches, performances and get-togethers. You eat an enormous variety of fresh, healthy food which is transported, stored, and prepared in exceedingly inefficiently small batches. Et cetera.

The fact that rich emit more carbon than the poor has nothing to do with the fact that the rich are evil or hypocritical, but simply with the fact that they are rich and spend more money. If you were rich, you would emit more carbon too. And if you lined up billionaires against the wall, confiscated their billions and gave them to the poor, the now less-poor would immediately start emitting more carbon.

I agree with what you are saying. I'm saying something a bit different. I'm saying that we should be honest and open about it, as you are being. The hypocrisy comes when we say things like this for the rich are earth friendly when their not, giving the people living the not earth friendly lifestyle less awareness of their impact, further distancing themselves from reality. Things like the big electric suvs that are less carbon efficient than a small gas car, many similar examples of "green-washing" luxury products. I'm saying that is hypocritical, not the fact that they consume more, but consuming more while claiming to consume less.

I don‘t think it is clear to everybody. What it is also saying is: More money means you are a greater liability for society. So in addition to having greater power you cause these additional costs for everyone - unless we finally manage to price in all external costs into CO2-producing consumption. Which is often estimated at somewhere between $100 and $250 per ton.

Trying to estimate the total costs of the externalities, like most economists currently suggest, is complete non-sense, in my opinion. Their methods are dubious to put it mildly [1], and they also replace the politically accepted goal with their own.

The politically accepted goal is to prevent dangerous levels of climate change. For this, we need to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in 2050, according to the climatologists. Since there is no way to reduce emissions to zero until then (or possibly ever), we need negative emissions.

Right now, getting a metric tonne of CO2 out of the atmosphere costs about US$ 600 per tonne (with a sufficiently long or large contract). These costs may drop in the future if scaled-up but US$ 600 per tonne is the best estimate we have right now.

This is what emitters need to pay. Something around US$ 175 per tonne (+/- 75) would only buy about 30 percent of the negative emissions needed to reach net-zero. In other words, it's insufficient.

And of course this applies to everybody, not just rich people.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2020.1807856

Yes, if we wanted to actually solve the problem, then the CO2 tax should be set at the level of the cheapest process that lets us capture CO2.

However, you must understand that even the existence of a CO2, even with a CO2 dividend is controversial, not because it doesn't work but rather people of lack of awareness and general disdain for taxes.

So having a low CO2 tax is still better than nothing.

Also, you might need to incrementally increase CO2 prices over time to make it possible for businesses to plan ahead for the next three decades. If you abruptly increase the tax you might ruin business decisions made decades ago which threatens economic stability.

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