The turtle cares because a pigouvian tax is the most effective means of keeping that cup out of the ocean in the first place.

You can't ban stuff because bans would be full of loopholes for "necessary" usage.

You can't just appeal to people's better nature because humans are humans.

We banned leaded fuel instead of taxing it, and it worked pretty well. Even if there’s a lot of loopholes, you can still cut most of the pollution

> You can't just appeal to people's better nature because humans are humans.

You must live in the alternate universe where everyone litters.

No, some people just don't litter. Whole cities where people don't litter! Sometimes, there is a clear protagonist and antagonist.

As an aside: an* effective means of keeping that cup out of the ocean is also to buy all the cups and not use them. Pretty much the exact OPPOSITE of a "pigouvian tax." Isn't that crazy?

What if we bought all the oil and didn't burn it? What if we buy all the land it's under? Or more realistically, what if I bought carbon credits in cap and trade and didn't use them?

Greg Mankiw has doomed a generation to inside-the-box policy with his inane textbook.

Bans can work and Pigouvian taxation can work. Horses for courses.

In Seattle we've banned the cheap plastic bags that blow around and get stuck in trees. There are many, many fewer tree-stuck-plastic-bag-ghosts to be seen around now. We've also put a mandatory 5c fee (not a tax, sadly) on paper bags; there are many, many more people bringing reusable bags to the supermarket.

(Ignores, of course, whether these reusable bags are better for the environment holistically -- having lots of yuppies buying synthetic shopping bags made in China and shipped to Amazon DCs, then having them individually shipped out in Prime boxes, etc. before being used is probably worse than just having pulp grown in America made into bags trucked en masse to the grocery and generally recycled or composted.)

Regarding carbon credits -- soon that will be not only feasible but tokenized and sub-divisible. See http://sparkchange.io/

If a tax is prohibitive, then by the same logic there will be loopholes for necessary usage.

It doesn't need to be globally prohibitive, it just needs to be sufficiently prohibitive as to curb majority use of the target. And usually the things that make the most use of the target is disproportionately affected by thin increases in cost.

eg if k-cups cost 2c to produce in plastic, and tax raises that cost to 5c, and margins were at 4c so now 1c, then it makes sense to start looking at alternative materials/strategies that weren't previously cost-effective.

At the same time, auto using a good deal of plastic per car, but much higher margins, and much less plastic use across the total market, might have their costs raised by $200 in total per car by the same tax; but if they had a $5k margin now dropped to $4.8k, they probably don't need to change much (they're still affected, but not nearly as bad).

The problem with plastic is that its cheap, so it can easily fit in disposable markets, but we really don't want it there, and disposable markets tend to have razor-thin margins. Ofc the strategy I just described might not actually affect K-cups: K-cups are really the only thing I can think of where plastic got added to make it a luxury product, rather than removed (cars otoh are luxury despite the plastic). And being a luxury product, it's probably got decent margins and can eat small tax increases.

But you can probably get 90% of the way there with minor taxes. And ofc you'll still have necessary usage for certain things (lets say, emergency shelters), but you can avoid adding loopholes to plastic by lowering less tax-burdens on other aspects of the target industry, which might be less viable/harmful to abuse.

Water became a product via added plastic

Bottled water & k-cups are fundamentally about time & convenience.

Buy a pack of bottled water or disposable cups and you just avoided an entire workload of maintaining, tracking and washing a bunch of cups. Out and about and don't want to maintain your own personal water bottle, and don't want flavored water? You buy bottled water!

Same with k-cups. You don't have to maintain a grinder and bean bags, you don't have to wait for the drip coffee machine to finally finish, you don't need to boil water for crappy instant coffee with sediment, you don't have to clean any of these machines either. You just fill the machine with water and clean your mug and maybe descale the thing a couple of times a year.

That's what the tax is for, to disincentive making a product that results in waste. If the tax makes the cost to produce a wasteful product higher than one which is recycled, companies won't produce waste (as much).

It’s about the closest market based solution that is likely to work. But I’ll cop to the turtle not caring, even if the extra revenue might 1. Reduce the likelihood the turtle ever even sees the cup or 2. Help cleanup the cups that are out there.

Since the turtle doesn’t care about the tax anyway, I’m willing to go the extra mile and simply ban single use polymer products altogether, and we’ll go back to however we handled things prior to their introduction into the marketplace.

If there is a way to exploit a system for personal gain people will do it. You can be an optimist but don't take this statement as fatalist or excusing, the tax levied on these goods should match or exceed the damage society thinks they are causing. This allows people who want to do the right thing to not suffer financially for doing it.

> The turtle choking to a Keurig cup in the Pacific doesn't really care that the cup had an additional tax on it.

Right, and the sea life dying from warming and acidification of the oceans doesn't really care that the carbon emissions had an additional tax on it....

Is tap water of higher quality?

Not everywhere.