I agree, but ideally, the high fee should be proportionate.

Cement is about $130/metric ton. A 30% surcharge seems comfortable. A 100%, I won't squirm at. An 800% surcharge feels punitive, rather than good policy.

I'd like far more surcharges for consumer-unfriendly and environmentally-unfriendly actions, but mostly in the 1-5% range. That's enough to impact most margin-constrained firms, but not so much as to avoid innovation or distort strategy.

Examples:

- Make products repairable

- Provide service manuals and full schematics

- Provide parts at no more than e.g. 2x cost of the product (e.g. if I wanted to buy all the parts for my washing machine to build a new one, it might cost $1000 instead of $500)

- Provide long support lives for e.g. security updates and parts

- Make firmware / software open-source (consider my air conditioner, rather than Microsoft Office)

- Use standard batteries and chargers

- Avoid plastic

- Minimize packaging

... etc.

In a commodity market (like basic air conditioners), a 5% surcharge is way more than enough to influence behavior. On the other hand, if I have a genuinely better battery, or something super-confidential in my firmware, I can still keep it secret at modest cost.

>It's usually better to have a high fee for things you don't want people to do rather than outright banning something.

Why? Any rule with a fine is a rule that the wealthy can just ignore. Why is that a desired attribute of the system?

Your example is great because it doesn't mean that planes very rarely land there and are very important, but rather that rich people land there to get a burger next door whenever they want.

>If it starts happening too often and the residents don't think they're getting a good deal, they can increase the fee.

I don't see how more money makes you sleep better at night when the rich private plane owner is flying over your house most nights.

Yes, that would be a great example, especially when applied to gasoline.

What could possibly go wrong from adding a sudden huge load to our already unstable and crumbling infrastructure?

It’s not like we don’t have any spare parts for the majority of our grid or anything, right?

Oh.

> when they do it was because it was really worth it to them

But this is totally unrelated to why the thing was banned in the first place. We don't ban things out of a moral concern that the perpetrators haven't fully considered their lives and decided what's really important to them, we ban things because we don't want them to happen.

I also disagree that "I am willing to pay a lot of money" has any correlation with "this action is worth a lot to me". To make that relationship work, the fine would have to be set at "whatever you personally consider to be a lot of money".

> The large fee compensates local residents in the form of reduced city taxes over time.

I wish lowering the taxes by compensating with other means was a more common approach. The most usual approach is accumulating income in whatever way possible.

What types of activities does this apply to and where does it not apply? Just for the sake of argument, could this also apply to something like murder? i.e. if you wanted to murder somebody, you can do so only if you pay a super high fee otherwise go to prison. If you pay the fee, it must be worth it to you.

> It's usually better to have a high fee for things you don't want people to do rather than outright banning something.

Even better is putting a high fee on things normal people have to do, so that you can continue to finance friends and family in the nomenklatura and make sure they afford everything that pleases them.

For a long time I have casually suggested a fuel tax that goes up by a dime per gallon per month, and just keeps increasing at that rate until the situation improves. It would take years for America to equal the OECD average fuel tax at that pace.

You are going to need to grandfather users of existing used cars if you don't want a mob with pitchforks and torches. Even when electric cars are affordable on average its necessary to understand the effect on price and value that would be caused by changing incentives. There are around 250 million fossil fuel cars on the road and $160/gallon fuel taxes would make those cars value effectively go to zero while sending electric cars price to the moon.

Even if scaled in over time to avoid breaking the economy you would have a long tail of cheap used cars which would be difficult for users to up and replace owned by those least likely to be able to absorb the shock.

You have folks commuting in a $5000 car for 10 years for which $20,000 would be a financial death sentence. There are plenty of folks who absolutely need a car to be able to work and continually keep an older used car for a LOT less than average.

Not all of these folks could even get a car loan for a compliant car so you would be basically telling them to go fuck themselves.

It makes more sense to simply mandate phasing out manufacturing or importing new gas powered consumer cars and let cars age out rather than using extreme gas taxes as a lever.

No cars on the roads works for short periods of time, but with 15 million people living in e.g. the London metro, you need something to move 15 million people's worth of living logistics (food, goods for sale, garbage removal, etc.). Those are all carried by wheeled vehicles, whether it be cars, vans, or lorries. The niceties of the suburban or urban areas aren't possible without them.

Even if they were all electric or powered by unicorn farts or whatever, it's still millions of multi-ton steel vehicles zipping around leaving as much trace as a multi-ton moving thing would. I grant you at least the air quality would be better without internal combustion.

In the end, all Europe is filled with cute little walkable towns, yet people still congregate to the congested, filthy, car-filled metros, for some reason. And at a certain level of built-up population density, you just can't have a very nice natural environment; the brief moments of peace you observed during the Covid lockdowns or whatever can't last, because that would mean the city itself dies.

I mean, sure, they made the urban environment better, if you don't count people being able to do things in that environment as an improvement.

In lockdown most people sat inside and went a bit crazy. That's not an improvement.

I don’t think you can wave off orders of magnitude with either of those clauses.

Capturing the carbon is only part of the cost... The other part is sequestering it for millions of years. Concrete is a great place to do that, where many other 'sequestering' techniques might only last tens or hundreds of years, requiring the capture fee be paid again and again and again.