I think discussions could get more constructive if proponents of CO2 tax did get conscious of the epycal change they are talking about.
The tax would have to be slowly introduced over period of many years. It is necessary for economy and various industries to adjust. New industry of scrubbing co2 needs funds and time to develop.
What does epycal mean? (Or what word did you mean?) Google failed me.
Kind of. Actually many high energy users like steel industry are often the primary clients of demand-response agreements with their suppliers. If it's in the contract and helps offset their energy costs then some variance isn't necessarily bad for their business.
All of your examples look like one issue to me, which is people unwilling to change their lifestyle and sacrifice their luxuries.
The only way out of this mess is to use less resources, which means consume less, travel less, have fewer children, etc. Carbon tax or dictatorial orders, the root of the problem is people don’t want to consume less, and our children and their children will pay the price due to us not wanting to pay it now.
To put down some numbers, Americans spend just 6.4% of their household income on food. Around 1950 they spent about 20%. It not that Americans eat one fifth as much as they used to (if anything the claim is that people eat more today), so the life style change is both that people need to pay more and eat less.
Similar if we talk about railway budget, the US government spend today about 0.00156% in proportion to the budget of 1950. It basically stopped investing into the railway infrastructure. Naturally the proportion of the population (and industry) that use the railway system has also gone down, through not as extreme as the budget.
The root of the problem is that people don't want to pay more to get less, and then also consume less at the same time. They also don't want to pay more taxes in order to invest heavily in infrastructure that take half a century before people see the benefits.
Confirm that it's 1/640th of the 1950 budget?! That seems insane. (Is it perhaps 1/6.4 [0.156% or 0.00156x] instead?)
The Federal Railroad Administration alone has a budget over $1.5BB. Does that mean we were spending the equivalent of almost a trillion of today's dollars a year (~25% of receipts) on rail in 1950? That seems several orders of magnitude wrong.
The numbers I read was that since 1950 the railway infrastructure budget has only increased by 30%. US budget in 1950 was around 70 billions, while 2018 it is 7 trillions. (https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/fed_spending_1950USbn)
The proportional funding should thus have went down by basically the same amount as the government spending went up. I might very well be wrong, and The Federal Railroad Administration was created in 1966 so I am not sure exactly which part of the government paid for railway before that point, and the 30% claim could of course be wrong. Department of Transportation has had a increase in funding by about 10x from 1970 to 2008, but I could not find exact numbers for the Federal Railroad Administration.
I agree with you this is a very important issue. But it's far too easy to underestimate the "stubborness" of people to keep living fine!
Literally all of these have cheap, trivial fixes that would reopen markets closed by the perverse subsidization we have now.
> People do not want their electric bill to jump ten (or more) folds
Power companies already offer budget billing to deal with the seasonal variation. It's trivial to extend this to some level of weather prediction. In fact there's already source variation taken into account. Even if the increased volatility causes the order of magnitude price changes, there is already a market for electric price smoothing through batteries and energy storage. Just look what Tesla did for this exact issue in Australia.
>Food prices would go up as rural living is directly impacted by carbon taxes.
I'm not sure how you're figuring this. If anything, food prices would decrease because we'd find more efficient local distribution techniques. Since rural areas is where the foo dis grown, that's where it would be the cheapest. In fact we not only already have more local distribution channels - we have federal infrastructure around it: https://www.ams.usda.gov/local-food-directories/farmersmarke.... Moreover, there's already a growing free market for this: https://fortune.com/2015/08/21/local-food-movement-business/.
> increased costs to personal transportation means a population that relies more on mass transit systems. That mean in order to keep people from moving to cities we need a significant investment into building out the railway system
I'm not following this argument. Increased reliance on mass transit would overall make everything cheaper, AVOIDing massive investments in both railroads and increased highway capacity.
I also don't follow your last point. Tariffs don't require treaties and are probably the best place to solve this in the beginning. As more nations enact their own carbon tariffs, we could begin to have a real discussion on international agreements.
People do not want their electric bill to jump ten (or more) folds just because wind production went down and now the gas turbine is burning, and they definitively do not want brownouts. Industries like steel and other high energy users is particular allergic to variance in power availability and price, and without tariffs it is practically impossible to demand it in a global economy.
Food prices would go up as rural living is directly impacted by carbon taxes. It used to be that the largest portion of a persons income went to pay for food. Today it is a rather small portion. Asking people to pay the carbon tax through increased food prices is a very hard proposition, and without tariffs it is practically impossible in a global economy.
Then we have urbanization where increased costs to personal transportation means a population that relies more on mass transit systems. That mean in order to keep people from moving to cities we need a significant investment into building out the railway system, which is the opposite what most countries has done in the last 50-80 years. That investment means raised taxes on top of the carbon tax. It also mean a increased strain on the infrastructure inside cities when density will increase while new infrastructure is being built, which mean more taxes.
Then we have international trade (air and sea transport) which is governed through international treaties. To be fair this is likely the easiest place to do a carbon tax as it would only effect all imports and exports and operate as a equal tariff for everyone, but getting people to agree to it it is a significant bigger hill than the Paris Agreement.