Microsoft’s quest to go ‘carbon negative’ inspires $1B fund

Re:Microsoft’s quest to go ‘carbon negative’ inspires $1B fund by usrusr on Friday January 17, 2020 @07:59AM (#22074201)

A far more streamlined implementation would be to simply apply a fee at resource extraction time on everything combustible taken out of the ground. It would do a little collateral taxation on carbon that ends up as unburnt plastics, but that's not necessarily a bad thing (if you want maximum accuracy, pay some back for non-degradable carbon upon reaching a landfill, the only form of sequestering that is used at scale)

Unfortunately I can't imagine how diplomacy could achieve something like that, given the extremely uneven distribution of resource extraction industries. Despite that it wouldn't even hurt the big oil nations, considering that they would not have a lot of difficulties passing on the cost to their buyers (assuming full global enforcement). The biggest logical opponents would not be oil/gas states like Saudi Arabia or Russia but those whose only domestic geological energy sources is carbon-inefficient coal.

(Edit: cleared up some illegible grammar and editing clutter)

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Re:Microsoft’s quest to go ‘carbon negative’ inspires $1B fund by scotty79 on Friday January 17, 2020 @09:07AM (#22074684)

> Unfortunately I can't imagine how diplomacy could achieve something like that, given the extremely uneven distribution of resource extraction industries.

You can still tax resource extraction industries in your country and importers of energy resources (if country of origin has lower carbon tax than your country).

This is already done for income tax. You are taxed on your foreign income but you can deduce the tax you already paid to foreign country.

This could impact your exports but with the money from carbon tax you could lessen the tax burden on manufacturers of your exports or even finance them directly.

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Re:Microsoft’s quest to go ‘carbon negative’ inspires $1B fund by radicalbyte on Friday January 17, 2020 @08:19AM (#22074331)

..and forest fires, deforestation, land use, methane from rubbish dumps, methane from permafrost and a thousand other things.

Still adding a large carbon tax directly at the source gives us pretty much the best bang-for-the-buck. It would have to be combined with deforestation taxes too otherwise you'll see countries like Brazil go into overdrive to export "green fuel".

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Re:Microsoft’s quest to go ‘carbon negative’ inspires $1B fund by usrusr on Friday January 17, 2020 @08:44AM (#22074529)

Methane is a powerful short term GHG, but long term only the CO2 left by decayed methane is relevant. Forest fires etc are completely temporary, contemporary trees are not geologically sequestered.

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Re:Microsoft’s quest to go ‘carbon negative’ inspires $1B fund by kazagistar on Friday January 17, 2020 @10:46AM (#22075601)

Every flat tax is fraught with issues. Now a huge number of people who can barely afford transportation simply can't anymore. So much has been spent subsidizing roads and by proxy suburbs over 70 years, and any plan will have to involve helping people trapped by those ciecumstances, or they will overturn those plans democratically.

In short, some people can afford to pay for climate change fixes, and some can't. Any solution will simply have to be progressive and have a fair, equal burden on everyone.

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Re:Microsoft’s quest to go ‘carbon negative’ inspires $1B fund by aaronblohowiak on Friday January 17, 2020 @12:34PM (#22076940)

This is the beauty of carbon taxes - in addition to creating incentives to avoid carbon emissions, they raise revenue. That raised revenue can then be directly given back to people. Wether you do so according to 1/(number of people) or some means-adjusted distribution is an exercise i will leave to the voter.

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Re:Microsoft’s quest to go ‘carbon negative’ inspires $1B fund by leoedin on Friday January 17, 2020 @11:17AM (#22075925)

If the goal is to reduce emissions, then a tax on emissions is the only solution. Anything else is too open to avoidance (just look at corporate tax avoidance).

Maybe there's other ways to make it better for the people who can't afford it - a tax free allowance they can claim back or similar.

I'm still not sure if this is feasible across borders though. How can you stop carbon tax havens?

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Re:Microsoft’s quest to go ‘carbon negative’ inspires $1B fund by aaronblohowiak on Friday January 17, 2020 @12:35PM (#22076946)

Tariffs.

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Re:Microsoft’s quest to go ‘carbon negative’ inspires $1B fund by usrusr on Friday January 17, 2020 @12:54PM (#22077197)

There are only two ways to reduce transportation emissions: do less transportation or introduce less emitting ways of transportation. If the poor are exempt then everybody is exempt because more money can only mean more freedom of choice, not less.

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