As they should, provided the consumer is paying and using the carbon.
Pay an airline to take you somewhere and produce carbon, pay someone to remove that carbon.
Pay an airline to take you somewhere and produce carbon, pay someone to remove that carbon.
It's like paying a fee when buying a car battery or car tires unless you return an old one.
The fee needs to be overly pegged to inflation or something though otherwise you end up with the glass / aluminum cans problem.
It's a tax to encourage the alternatives. If an electric car costs more than an ICE car, then taxing ICE cars through a carbon tax will make the electric car more attractive, at least on the margins.
> It's costing everybody more and people are being paid twice. I'm thinking especially of the companies trying to sequester carbon in the wells they empty - they end up making money both ways.
Similar logic to the above applies. Oil companies might be able to charge more for a barrel of oil, but it's not like that barrel of oil is suddenly more useful. That's bad for oil companies because it makes the economics of their product worse. They have to do more "stuff" to sell a given barrel of oil, but their competitors (solar panels or whatever) don't.
Sure, but the reason solar panels are popular is because they're (mostly) the cheapest way to generate power. By adding an additional tax to petroleum products based on say sequestering costs (as opposed to some made-up I won't chop down a forest offset) it encourages non-petroleum products to be used.
It's basically a tariff for clean energy.
The entity who caused the pollution should be responsible for paying to clean it up. For logistical purposes it might make sense to tax at the point of production/sale rather than actual emission, eg. taxes at gas stations rather than some sort of monitoring system on every car.
> The problem is this is energy and resources that could be spent on actually solving the problem at its source instead of finding ways to maintain the status quo.
If the alternatives are actually cheaper, the market will naturally work itself out, because polluters would be incentivized to switch. Nobody uses plastic utensils in place of reusable ones, not because the government banned them, but because everyone knows the latter are so much cheaper.
explain? at least with carbon since it's fungible and global it's probably the easiest to clean up, compared to exxon trying to clean an oil spill or whatever.
Buy electricity from coal and the power plant is the emitter, who should pay for capture. However, if you are a electricity customer, expect that cost to be passed on to you on your bill.