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Comment by timthelion | Hacker News Reader

Rewarding emissions reductions is a pretty weird perverse incentive. Those who emit the most await the greatest reward. Carbon credits are in general pretty stupid, a carbon tax is what is needed.

Sometimes I think we should have only an LVT and a carbon tax. Every year the government would tally up how much it spent and send out bills for land ownership and carbon emissions. There would be no deficits, the goverment would necessarilly collect as much as it spent (with the exception of non payment), and it would eliminate all need for any tax beurocracy and record keeping.

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> Every year the government would tally up how much it spent

Sounds simple. How would you limit how much government plans to spend? Like, "oh yeah, we can now do everything we want, because we don't have any ceiling, we just offload it on land owners". There would still need to be some kind of budget.

Land owners will vote for politicians who spend less.

Renters too! I'm sure the tax would be pass through in any rental contract.

IMHO we need both taxes and incentives. Use the taxes to pay for the incentives. Make the polluters pay for the fix. That would be fair but we don't live in a fair world.

Carbon taxes seem a lot more controversial (especially among anti-tax populists) than incentives are because "borrowing" (aka printing money) is a nice loophole where you can have lots of incentives without taxing people for it.

Incentives are less controversial and a lot easier to implement. Everybody likes benefitting from incentives. And they work. Republicans hate increasing taxes but they love printing money as much as the Democrats do. They only are in favor of reducing the deficit when they are not in power. When they are, the deficit goes up. That was true under Trump, both Bush presidencies. And even Reagan spent more than he cut and increased the deficit. Spending is just easier than cutting. Economies are not circular. You don't have to raise every penny you spend via taxes.

That's also how the inflation reduction act works. Which is an ironic name because printing an extra trillion or so dollars is going to have some inflationary effects. But it undeniably has a great stimulating impact as well as there now is a lot of economic activity around renewable energy that is creating a lot of growth, jobs, etc. A trillion $ in new taxes would have most of the US population picking up pitchforks and heading out to lynch politicians. Sadly, some of that goes straight to the oil and gas industry though. But at least they now pretend a bit harder that they don't want to continue to rake in billions by getting us to buy oil and gas for as long as they can get away with that.

not saying i disagree with the sentiment. but, how do you count the carbon emissions.

That's a huge unsolved issue with the Carbon Tax AND Carbon Credits solutions. Your idea doesn't solve it.

Well for fossil fuels there is a pretty straightforward calculation for emissions per unit of fuel. You can tax it at the point of sale to the end customer. Are their non fossil fuel carbon emissions that are hard to count?

I would simply tax the sale of fossil fuels. Sure, there are other major sources of carbon in agriculture, but for every gram of carbon from fossile fuels oil, gas or coal is bought or mined. I would go with the simple thing, I don't think carbon emissions from agricultural tillage need be taxed.

That's the right answer, the whole problem comes from fossil fuel in the first place and making them more expensive will bubble up emission gains through the economic chain.

The actual problem is a little more difficult - clearly fuel is often taxed, but the question is how much tax should be paid on which fuels, in which industries and in which countries.

Should an American putting fuel into their hummer pay the same level of duties on a litre of diesel as someone putting fuel in their tractor in Uganda, and how do we get all the countries to agree what the acceptable rate is?

Usually agriculture is very subsidied everywhere yes because countries want cheap food for stability which is totally understandable.

There are nasty side effects to that though, the first one being that these subsidies usually are based directly or indirectly on the land size which made less efficient food products like meat much more subsidized than anything else.

We'll have to bring some more rational approach there if we want to improve the land use for climate change.

And then there's also the utility of the fuel used as you mentioned, there should be a difference of treatment between tractors and private jets indeed. But I don't think it needs to be too precise, cutting the worst offenders and taxing otherwise should be good enough.

That's only one dimension - Another major dimension is country.

The same tax applied globally will have very different effects in a third world country to a first world country. Farmers in the USA will react very differently to a 5p per litre tax to farmers in Burundi.

As long as taxes are applied in the developed world and the big polluters, the rest (like Burundi) are rounding errors at best.

Well China still sees itself as a developing country, and would make up about 30% of CO2, so it all depends on definitions and international agreement.

I'd argue that China is pretty bad at this, it's a developed country indeed but has the same CO2 per capita as France when excluding the exports, that's a very bad result and that's why it should be included since it's a big polluter.

Usually developed countries are emitting less, the cause of that abnormally bad result is the high number of coal plants in China.

Groups like the IMF recommend different pricing floors for low income, middle income, and high income countries:

https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2022/05/19/blog-why-co....

You calculate the carbon emissions per unit of fuel, which is basic chemistry, and you tax the carbon. The whole point of a carbon tax is to avoid value judgements about which carbon emission is more acceptable than which.

However you mentioned America and Uganda. They would have different tax rates based on agreements between countries. The fact that the US is the largest historical emitter and poorer countries need more flexibility to emit carbon in order to grow is already well established in country to country discussions on this subject. Often the suggestion is that carbon tax funds from historical emitters would partially go to paying poor countries to upgrade to green infrastructure.

For example see this 2022 article from the IMF: https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2022/05/19/blog-why-co....

> They would have different tax rates based on agreements between countries.

Yes - but the issue is how to get global agreement between all countries.

i.e. Will the USA agree to be taxed substantially more per unit than China and Russia?

In New Zealand we have a pretty effective system that covers all fossil fuel use nationally, as well as several other greenhouse gas emission classes (notably not agricultural emissions though hopefully they’re included soon). The EU has something similar as do several other jurisdictions. It’s a solved problem at scale.

In NZ we also have an effective system for recognising and incentivising certain classes of forest carbon removals (which I think are a legitimate and important class of credits - unlike avoided emission credits which I agree are junk).

Monitoring carbon emissions is not unsolved. It’s not perfect but there are lots of highly detailed, advanced solutions out there

> but, how do you count the carbon emissions.

for anything fuel-based (both fossil and "renewable" such as wood pellets and biogas), we know how much CO2 a given quantity of fuel emits. Place a tax on the importers and producers of the raw material, that's it.

Other processes that emit greenhouse gases - especially construction and agriculture such as cow farms - are a bit more difficult to calculate, but there's enough data available to make reasonable averages.

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