Hacker News Reader

Comment by azemetre | Hacker News Reader

I'm not talking about just banning plastics (it should be banned involving anything food related IMO) but actually taxing these materials as the hazardous materials they surely are.

Why would you ever expect a bottling plant to move away from plastic when there is no incentive? Why would anyone move to better materials or continue researching when there are cheaper alternatives that aren't rightfully taxed against their externalities?

Why are we as a society, one which has banned lead from gasoline (resulting in lower crime rates across the world) or banning CFCs to repair the ozone layer, feel so helpless trying to hold these corporations accountable for not polluting our world around us today?

Is it really that impossible?

View on HN

I don't think I generally agree with a plastic tax but lets imagine there was one. I am honestly not even sure how you would set the price, my whole point is the externalities are hard to measure. I also suspect the cost of the implementation will be on the shoulders of the consumer. We can hand wave it away and say we can create more rules to prevent it but at the end of the day that is most likely what will happen.

There's no reason the tax needs to directly reflect the environmental impact. We figure out an amount that is enough to change corporate behavior without bankrupting them, maybe with some kind of sliding scale to put more responsibility on larger businesses who would otherwise benefit from regulatory capture, throw in some exceptions for the aforementioned medical devices, etc. "Pricing the externalities in" is a nice political justification but in reality this kind of thing happens because we've already decided that plastics are significantly worse than the alternative and we want to incentivize change.

Regarding consumers shouldering the cost - well, yeah, regulation drives prices up; even my liberal self agrees that that's broadly true. Those same consumers will be shouldering the cost of an environment permeated by toxic microplastics, which we are increasingly being driven to believe will be a greater impact than that of more expensive consumer goods.

and when they jack up prices, we use the tax revenue to subsidize the poor so only the well off pay that assholery, we can do this for carbon in all forms.

For someone so skeptical, why buy the 'cost increases will be passed on to the consumer' BS? Clearly that's not true.

First, price increases depend on elasticity. I'm guessing that ketchup demand is pretty elastic; it's not diabetes medication or higher education.

Also, we can assume Heinz, being sophisticated, has already priced it for the highest possible marginal return; there's not necessarily room for increasing the price without reducing return (by driving down sales).

Yeah that will never happen in many countries.

It's possible but there is no voting solution to achieve it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com