The simple solution is to build more nuclear. When energy generation doesn’t require burning things, this solves itself. A carbon neutral grid means we can use as much air conditioning as we want. I was in Rome and France last week and “less AC” would have meant vulnerable people potentially dying in the heat.

That said, binding environmental costs to actual prices would be terrific.

But if households only generate 1/5 of overall emissions (depending on data and negligent of consumption), we might need other mechanisms.

You can control many things through taxes, but I believe this to be inefficient. I would have no problem with paying double for fuel. But that isn't the reality for most people that are dependent on cars.

Better than nothing perhaps, but I have very low expectations for this tax.

I'm reminded of how the German word for "tax" is "Steuer", i.e. steering/control, which encourages smarter thinking about tax policy because it acknowledges precisely this effect on incentives.

A carbon divided, which is to say redistributing the income of the carbon tax equally and directly to the people should at least in principle be uncontroversial because it is both socially equitable (richer people live more carbon intensive lives and thus contribute more), and it sets the right consumption incentive without taking money out of people's personal pockets (which should please conservatives).

Consumers pay some carbon taxes directly (e.g. while buying gasoline), but does this account for indirect carbon taxes (e.g. the natural gas used in making fertilizer to grow the food that the cow ate to make this burger?).

At the end of the day, a lot of our purchases are really paying for the energy used in its production at some level.

In practice, it's @#%#ed up, as usual. They didn't implement a carbon tariff, so foreign fertilizer would have been a lot cheaper than domestic fertilizer. But instead of putting a carbon tariff on foreign fertilizer, they gave domestic fertilizer a 90% exemption.

If not, go troll somewhere else.

Combined with the efforts to switch the grid to renewables (net-zero electric grid by 2040 and net-zero altogether by 2050) this should greatly reduce emissions coming from eating.

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/6/20/1869105...

In fact, New York has aggressively limited the expansion of natural gas pipelines and recently both ConEd and National Grid, two major gas providers, said in response they will stop expanding their network. IMO New York's energy agencies are using this to see if they can fully eliminate fossil fuels from new development and start a phase out.

https://enerknol.com/national-grid-stops-accepting-new-gas-s...

https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/All-Programs/Programs/Clean-Energ...

I think a lot of common sense has been lost in the design of homes. In the south of Europe homes are often comfortable with minimal or no air-conditioning because they have designs suitable for the climate. However, this means having small windows which aren't directly exposed to sunlight, tiled or marble floors etc.

This claim is incompatible the Second Law of Thermodynamics: "Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other change, connected therewith, occurring at the same time."