this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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it'd put a massive dent into global warming.
Agriculture at least in the United States makes up like 12% of total emissions. Land use overall sinks like 12% of carbon as well.
The only way we put a massive dent in global warming is if we tax carbon and in the use of fossil fuels. All of this eating meat shit is a distraction.
Does taxed carbon do less damage to the environment? My guess would be that the only thing that would happen are increased consumer prices. Wealthy people simply pay their "pollution fee" and keep going.
Just put your ignorance on a big billboard for us.
A tax on carbon, administered properly, is the most effective single way to get people to reduce their carbon usage over time by increasing the cost of polluting.
You start with it fairly low, and you crank it up over the years such that businesses and other groups are encouraged to move away from carbon wherever possible in order to save money, because the carpet is more expensive than non-carbon alternatives.
The point is to make a gallon of gas so expensive that's someone chooses to carpool or drive a bike or move closer to where they work. So yeah it's going to increase consumer prices, but that's what you have to do in order to reduce carbon emissions. Our lifestyle is where the carbon emissions are coming from.
No other scheme is as effective and as simple as a ramping carbon tax. It's very easy to tax carbon at its origin, the oil wells and ports. And the market ensures that all prices you apply at the oil well slowly filter down through the economy and impact areas that use more fossil fuels more thanks to the increased costs.
And then with a revenue neutral carbon tax, You can make it so that there is near zero net impact on people's well-being, short of the fact that people who pollute and emit more carbon will get less money back relative to their increase in cost.
Companies are the biggest polluters. And production of products with high CO2 footprint would simply move to countries that don't care. That's what happens with most environmental or financial regulation. What makes you think a carbon tax would be different? Imho a system that is based on unlimited exponential growth is the problem.
Then you apply import taxes. Any restriction we take on carbon will have that effect.
Our current existence is unsustainable. If we stop growing we will snuff ourselves out. The only way out through shrinking would be a thanos style culling.
The only way forward is forward.
Import taxes on carbon would only work if we could track the carbon along the supply chain. Don't get me wrong, we're on the same side basically I'm just pessimistic that it'll be that easy. Having said that, I have to admin that I don't have any idea about how to fix that.
You don't have to track the carbon along the supply chain because carbon is sourced very easily from a single place, the oil taken out of the ground.
Theoretically you could do stuff like tax the manufacturing of CFCs, but those are largely handled and easily handled by regular regulation already.
There's more than the oil. There's gas, other resources like lithium, deforestation and the list goes on. Let's say you buy solar cell panels. Were they produced using electricity from renewables or burnt oil? That should make a big difference if you want that tax to reduce carbon output. Right now there's no way to track that.
Edit: Maybe your idea is to tax the resources right at their sources. That would help indeed, but good luck with the leaders or countries like Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, ..
It would be a difference. If you tax carbon at the pump you couldn't build the solar panels without paying the carbon tax that was charged at the pump.
As for countries like China, that's what tariffs are for
That might work theoretically. The problem with that is that you cannot differentiate between that absolutely wasteful things (like private jets) and things we need in day to day life (like pharmaceuticals). You might even want to exempt the solar panels from the example above, because they will probably save more carbon than what was used to produce them. So that's really the "sledgehammer" kind of solution.
The point is to make things that use carbon cost more than things that use less. Some sectors like private aircraft will have people willing to pay whatever because they're already hugely expensive, but on the larger scales a carbon tax will clean up the vast majority of waste.
For a few of the worst examples like private jets it's possible to pass regulation against them, but I'd be very very hesitant to accept the government deciding what is or isn't wasteful across the board. It'll be hilariously harmful in the long term.
And the tax should apply to important things too. We need carbon removed across the whole economy, including medications.
Some industries, like the pharmaceuticals, may not be able to switch away from mineral oils so easily. That's why I prefer a balanced approach that makes unnecessary or even luxurious things way more expensive. The carbon tax approach would work in terms of "reducing carbon" but the people who are already struggling in day to day life would be hit the hardest. Those are the poor folks that have to commute to work with older cars because their bosses decided that there is no more home office.
The government making a list of what is wasteful and what not would probably fail, you're right about that. In the long term the carbon tax is a good solution. It's easy to implement but that doesn't mean that it's easy to make the transition for many people. And by "not easy" I don't mean "stop eating meat because of the carbon", which would be very easy compared to "buy 3 times more expensive gas to go to work or buy food for the week and loose your job".
Every country now has to measure the carbon output of factories in every other country in order to correctly impose import taxes on carbon. Either that, or just blanket raise import taxes, which would strangle any country that is isn't large and developed enough to at least theoretically reach self-sufficiency, which none currently are in practice. This is not realistic or sustainable. Stop trying to tax the problem away. The invisible hand of the free market is a myth. Real problems require real hands to fix them.
This is capitalist jibber-jabber. There is no reason we can't slow down on the non-essential overconsumption rampant in modern society, and still be able to efficiently manage and redirect those resources and labor towards necessities in a more sustainable way. We have way more than enough resources to live in comfort and still be sustainable. "Yolo, floor it" is not a sane policy.
No you don't. Just text the shit out of any of the imports until they are cost competitive with the domestic ones.
Boo hoo. Cry me a river, I don't give a shit. I give a shit about global warming not happening. They can tax their oil in the same way and they won't have issues.
Yeah, there's a slight problem in that. You're talking about a Soviet economy. You're talking about intentionally impoverishing people.
You're talking about taking people's freedom away from them in order to mandate what they can and can't have.
And you're doing it all in the name of an end goal that won't even fix the problem, because at the end of the day as long as we are still using fossil fuels we are still going to run out of time when it comes to global warming.
A shutdown Soviet style economy is not going to create the innovation we need to actually innovate our way out of this problem.
It's almost as if my actual proposed policy would be one that encourages innovation and movement away from fossil fuels while not absolutely annihilating the economy and empowering government to fuck over our lives.
And this is the fundamental problem right here that you don't understand. It doesn't matter if you don't give a shit; if it means suffering because they cannot sustain themselves now, they are not going to do it. When a solution doesn't work, you don't whine and demand the world reshape itself until your solution does work, you look for a better idea. We need real solutions that work in the real world, not technocratic dreaming of alternate realities.
Everything else in your post is just more jibberjabber that doesn't mean anything. What I've proposed isn't "Soviet", it isn't impoverishing (but what you suggested absolutely is, so don't pretend to care about that), and it actually solves the problem instead of these candy-ass solutions. "Just tax everything and then the problem will just magically solve itself through innovation, somehow!" The product of a deeply unserious mind.
Get it through your head that these indirect methods that supposedly set in motion a series of events that will totally eventually fix it have never worked, they're not going to work now, and we need real action and not people soying out over idealistic nonsense. Your time to try this passed by 30 years ago. Give up your silly Rube Goldberg contraptions and start looking for real, direct solutions.
I'd say bring able to trade with one of the biggest nations in the world is a pretty darn good incentive to implement a carbon tax of their own.
You understand your idea of sustaining themselves is burning more carbon and letting their needs undercut our emissions reduction. This is a net loss.
Says the person whose "simple" solution involves a far far more disruptive answer whose unexpected consequences will far surpass a tax.
What trade? You told them to levy hefty import taxes on everything. You've killed most trade.
I want a collective effort to directly end carbon emissions. You just want to make it more expensive.