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Comment by timthelion | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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