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Comment by phalangion | Hacker News Reader

One of the roles government can play is to take the negative externalities of an activity (e.g., pollution) and internalize it so that those costs are paid by those who are profiting. The way to do that is to create taxes, fee structures, etc. so that those making money on activities contribute to the overall societal cost.

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That's assuming the money made by internalizing the externalities is used to benefit those who would otherwhise be negatively affected by them.

It'd be a worse situation if the money is spent, for example, running campaigns for the next elections.

A better arragement would be for the affected people to receive the tax payments directly.

Effective regulation could actually have made clean coal plants. In principle that junk can be filtered, but it was cheaper to lobby for rules exemptions than to pay for filters.

Sometimes damage can be prevented instead of remediated. Sometimes it isn't about victims getting paid, but preventing people from being victimized.

Effective regulation was not achieved, so it makes sense to demand the next most beneficial action for users. I wouldn't trust the people in charge though.

Not necessarily. Often the incumbent technology remains that way simply because it’s cheaper. If the taxes cause the price to go up enough that it has a similar cost to an alternative, the alternative has a chance of becoming the preferred option. It doesn’t matter where the extra tax money goes for this to be effective.

Sure it would be nice if it helped victims, etc, but getting that part figured out would be a prime target for the incumbents to derail the whole process.

That's right. I think taxes are not the right solution for this.

Victims most be compensated, but adding tax to a certain technology is just a failing band-aid as you exemplify.

The fundamental problem is people being out of the picture in all of this. The solution must necessarily have common people involved.

I completely agree.

But villifying the companies that sell "oil" is getting ridiculous at this point. Not to mention, the "Big, bad oil companies" are some of the biggest investors in clean energy. They look at themselves as energy companies... the keyboard warriors here seem to thank that their entire marketing budget is going towards denying climate change... Comparing oil to drugs is a prime example of that line of thinking.

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