As always in the EU, the exact effect of these differs by country (EU directives describe goals, and leave the means to get there to member countries)
It seems like a better idea would be to just have Amazon give you a voucher for the recycling fees in your local community.
Edit: summary at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste_in_China
There's far more stuff coming from China to the west than vice-versa. A ship can't travel empty, but needs to be ballasted with an appropriate weight of cargo. If there isn't enough booked cargo on the return leg to China, they'll make up the weight with scrap metal or rubble.
Sure, send them back to China, I don't care, it just seems silly that we would all just mail our broken junk back one piece at a time to AMazon who then puts it in a container and sends it to China.
Better to take it to alocal recycling facility for them to send it en masse. Have Amazon give you a voucher to handle the recycling fee.
Still, Amazon just gifted me an item when I tried to return it since I ordered it by mistake (and I was honest on the form). I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to avoid recycling returns too.
That can't work for any country that has "country".
In the US, the vast majority of goods are delivered using trucks that burn diesel.
You can't have a gas tax without a diesel tax. Everyone would just switch over.
If you tax gas, you effectively tax everything, and that's not okay for any economy.
Why? The purpose of the carbon tax is to capture the negative externality of carbon pollution, and to encourage more energy-efficient industries. Not all parts of the economy use equal amounts of energy, and we should encourage the energy-efficient ones.
I burn carbon when I drive my car to work. I burn much less carbon when I take the bus to work. We want to encourage the latter - carbon taxes let the market do this encouragement. The alternative is doing so by government fiat.
I understand that. It's the obvious reasoning behind a gas tax.
My entire point is that there are also other effects.
If gas prices raise significantly, then the price of everything - groceries, medication, clothing, cleaning supplies, solar panels, everything - raises, meaning simple things that everyone relies on suddenly become unaffordable to low-wage workers, so their employers suddenly need to raise profits to accommodate the price hike, and raise wages for the bulk of their employees, or (more likely) simply fail, resulting in a significant unemployment increase.
You can't just magically fix climate change by putting the poor out of work, nor should you.
> encourage more energy-efficient industries.
This can be done with much more reasonable methods. Don't forget that transportation is not the only significant source of carbon emissions. The best legislative efforts we can make are to support clean energy (nuclear, wind, solar).
If I can get that 17% function to run in 94% of the time, that is a greater gain from less effort than making any of those <1% functions run in 50% of the time.
The same principle applies to air pollution. Focus on the container ships burning bunker oil and the power plants burning coal first. Personal transportation using internal combustion engines is one of those 1% things, and even then, just taxing the gasoline won't help all that much.
As parent mentioned, it will also stifle the economic activity that could allow ordinary people to afford capital investments like at-home solar energy systems. And while one presumes that a "carbon tax" on gasoline fuel should be used to combat air pollution elsewhere, that is not necessarily how it will be spent.
British Columbia has a revenue-neutral carbon tax [1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia_carbon_tax
Especially in the US, where we are likely to raise the defense budget from $500 billion to $700 billion per year.
Makes me think about how much carbon is released for "defense".
-Thirty Ninth President of the United States of America Ronald Reagan.
Why not, we already tax everything as it is right now? And lots of places have carbon taxes, it works fine.
Businesses that rely on low wage workers suddenly have two major problems:
1. They have to find more profit to accommodate shipping expenses
2. They have to pay their workers more
Both of those problems are incredibly difficult to some, and both of them together are deadly to business.
A gas tax would significantly harm the livelihood of poor hard working people.
The poor just take transit or bike.
Even some of the big cities (like LA) have woefully lacking transit and everyone just sits in gridlocked traffic for multiple hours every day.
While running a car may be cheap in financial terms in the US, environmentally and in terms of scarce natural resources it is anything but, and at some point the US is going to have to deal with the social acceptability of one person driving an enormous vehicle for long distances many times per week or within our lifetimes there are going to be serious problems.
A metro's most car-dependent are its working poor, who need to live the furthest away from the downtown core to afford housing.
They live outside the cities where housing is more affordable but there's no public transport
Also, I also think we should have a carbon recapture tax added to gasoline, but no one I know really wants to pay an additional tax of 7-10$/gallon.