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Comment by david-gpu | Hacker News Reader

This is why I am in favor of a carbon dividend: tax carbon emissions at the source and distribute the revenue equally among residents. This way the average person doesn't experience any difference.

The main challenge is finding a reasonable way of dealing with imports.

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Also a fan of revenue neutral carbon pricing that uses a standard dividend. Pricing externalities does seem like the only realistic way to solve tragedy of the commons issues like climate change. The weight of regulating individual actions would be impossibly complex.

I also think pricing alone isn't sufficient since there are many poor people who can't really make different choices about their consumption even if they want to. Without choice carbon pricing loses effectiveness, since there isn't any way to optimize your costs.

The edge case I think about a lot is a poor urban/suburban renter without access to functional public transit. Since they rent they can't take steps to improve the efficiency of their dwelling. They can't rely on transit to get to work due to poor service reliability. Sprawling car-centric development means cycling is dangerous and far, so they must maintain a private vehicle, which is likely to be old and inefficient in order to be affordable. A dividend is unlikely to be sufficient to fundamentally change any of these conditions since this person is likely to be roughly revenue-neutral.

I'm largely in agreement with you but I think the payout from the carbon tax should be higher on the poor side of the spectrum and much lower on the wealthy side. Alternatively, one could use the carbon tax to feed a negative income tax.

The net effect of a carbon tax already very negative for the wealthy and positive for the working class. Perhaps you underestimate the carbon footprint of different folks -- precisely the subject of article under discussion.

Imports aren’t so challenging: You’re effectively imposing a new tariff, and tariff calculation is already a complex business of defining categories and setting rates.

It’s a drop in the proverbial bucket for some Federal agency to annually assess the rough carbon intensity of a dollar’s worth of exports from 150 nations across a few dozen industries.

> carbon dividend: tax carbon emissions at the source and distribute the revenue equally among residents

I've always thought this would be the best way to get political support from a majority. There's enough data out there that the gov't ought to be able to (a) come up with some very firm predictions of who would come out ahead and (b) whip up a website for people to profile their own case.

> The main challenge is finding a reasonable way of dealing with imports.

Which requires revisiting the postal treaties that lead to shipping from China costing less than across town.

I agree. Imagine if we had tried to tackle ozone depletion by saying "thou shall not buy CFCs nor use products or services which make use of CFC" and had created a "CFC personal footprint" and set about finding those individuals whose choices seemed to create the worst measure of CFC footprint.

It's just madness! Instead we regulated them and the problem resolved.

The reason CFC regulation succeeded is just because they turned out to be easy to replace. This is not the case for hydrocarbons and concrete

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