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Comment by ericd | Hacker News Reader

We don’t need to wait for technical solutions to make things cheaper. We need a revenue neutral carbon tax with dividend. For most people, especially the poor, they’d come out ahead, and it would allow the market price signals to gently steer everyone toward a lower carbon life.

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How do you get people to vote for this given that it will increase prices/lower their standard of living today?

It's revenue-neutral, so all money collected gets redistributed out evenly, per-capita (the "dividend" part). The way that then works out is that if you're responsible for less carbon emission than average in your country, then you end up ahead, potentially well ahead. Since carbon emission maps pretty well to material consumption, and things like flying a lot, that means that most people will end up ahead, and this mainly costs more for people on the richer end of the spectrum. Likely the breakeven point is well above the median, given how wealth and income are distributed in a bit of a power law distribution. An extremely rich person gets the same amount back as anyone else, but his yacht and private jet become a hell of a lot more expensive to run.

This also has the benefit of making local manufacturing more competitive with overseas, since transportation becomes a larger part of the cost of goods. This would give blue collar workers back some of the leverage they've lost over the past decades.

So most people voting in just their short-term self-interest would do well to vote for this. And everyone gets the long-term benefit of civilization being less likely to collapse with massive resource shortages.

The challenge is explaining it well enough that people understand well that it's in their benefit. But I think "all the money from the tax goes into your bank accounts every month" would help a lot.

That was tried in Ontario (cap and trade), but there was enough misinformation going around that the general populace thought it was just a standard tax on individuals.

Did the people there start getting money every month into their bank account (the “dividend” part)? If not, I imagine that that would’ve cleared that misinformation up rather quickly.

Washington State does cap and trade on industry. And yes, it has just become a 'standard tax' on individuals passed from industry to the pump to the tune of 40-50 cents/gal. While I agree that it is important to reduce consumption of fossil fuels, the infrastructure isn't there to enable people to commute from lower-cost areas of living to higher-cost areas of working.

This will likely be repealed by voters via initiative[0] this fall.

[0] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/initia...

More fun reading on our defacto gas tax:

https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/former-wsd...

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