Re:Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0
by philwelch on Monday August 03, 2020 @03:07PM
(#24041976)
> In the scenario you describe, the carbon tax would have to be high enough to make burning gas more expensive than renewables. Maybe that would work in this scenario? I don't know.
It’s possible the tax isn’t high enough. And it’s also possible that for some applications, people will choose to simply pay the tax rather than change their energy source because there isn’t e.g. a more economical source of jet fuel yet. But having a tax will tip the cost-benefit balance for a lot of people, and if it doesn’t do enough, a higher tax might.
Also, it might turn out in this scenario that building nuclear plants or capturing my gas plant’s carbon emissions end up being cheaper than switching to renewables. The point, from a policy standpoint, is that the government doesn’t care to second-guess how carbon emissions are reduced so long as they are reduced.
In theory, a cap-and-trade system—in which the government simply mandates how much carbon can be pumped into the atmosphere and auctions off tradable permits to do so—would work as well. This is how a lot of emissions are currently regulated in the US. A carbon tax is just a different mechanism to apply the same market forces.
> It also is reactive, rather than proactive. Tax is levied only after environmental damage is done.
I would also favor a carbon tax credit for actually extracting and sequestering surplus carbon from the atmosphere for this reason.
However, I think you’re implicitly missing the whole point of the carbon tax. A carbon tax, like any Pigovian tax, is most successful when it collects the least revenue. The most cost-effective mitigation for climate change is to stop emitting so much carbon. The goal isn’t to make people pay the carbon tax; it’s to make people change their behavior so they don’t have to pay the carbon tax.
> Given "politics", it is also highly likely that the tax might never be used for environmental remediation.
That’s not the point. In fact—since carbon taxes behave like consumption taxes and overwhelmingly impact the poor—many people favor a revenue neutral carbon tax that returns every cent collected to taxpayers in the form of a universal tax credit.
> From both an economic, environmental, and political impact perspective, it is significantly more efficient to put the burden of environmental action on producers of products rather than consumers. Don't given consumers an incentive to consume renewables and products made from them, give the producers who would otherwise use less environmentally friendly products an incentive to never create those products in the first place
Yes, that’s exactly how a carbon tax works. It wouldn’t be paid directly by consumers, except for fairly obvious things like taxes on gasoline or propane.
When I’ve been saying “people”, remember that producers are people too. In fact, producers are often more governed by the sort of bean-counting, cost-minimizing behavior that carbon taxes are meant to influence in the first place.
> Also none of this helps with a UBI.
I agree, for reasons I’ve outlined elsewhere. I don’t really care since I see them as separate issues though.
It’s possible the tax isn’t high enough. And it’s also possible that for some applications, people will choose to simply pay the tax rather than change their energy source because there isn’t e.g. a more economical source of jet fuel yet. But having a tax will tip the cost-benefit balance for a lot of people, and if it doesn’t do enough, a higher tax might.
Also, it might turn out in this scenario that building nuclear plants or capturing my gas plant’s carbon emissions end up being cheaper than switching to renewables. The point, from a policy standpoint, is that the government doesn’t care to second-guess how carbon emissions are reduced so long as they are reduced.
In theory, a cap-and-trade system—in which the government simply mandates how much carbon can be pumped into the atmosphere and auctions off tradable permits to do so—would work as well. This is how a lot of emissions are currently regulated in the US. A carbon tax is just a different mechanism to apply the same market forces.
> It also is reactive, rather than proactive. Tax is levied only after environmental damage is done.
I would also favor a carbon tax credit for actually extracting and sequestering surplus carbon from the atmosphere for this reason.
However, I think you’re implicitly missing the whole point of the carbon tax. A carbon tax, like any Pigovian tax, is most successful when it collects the least revenue. The most cost-effective mitigation for climate change is to stop emitting so much carbon. The goal isn’t to make people pay the carbon tax; it’s to make people change their behavior so they don’t have to pay the carbon tax.
> Given "politics", it is also highly likely that the tax might never be used for environmental remediation.
That’s not the point. In fact—since carbon taxes behave like consumption taxes and overwhelmingly impact the poor—many people favor a revenue neutral carbon tax that returns every cent collected to taxpayers in the form of a universal tax credit.
> From both an economic, environmental, and political impact perspective, it is significantly more efficient to put the burden of environmental action on producers of products rather than consumers. Don't given consumers an incentive to consume renewables and products made from them, give the producers who would otherwise use less environmentally friendly products an incentive to never create those products in the first place
Yes, that’s exactly how a carbon tax works. It wouldn’t be paid directly by consumers, except for fairly obvious things like taxes on gasoline or propane.
When I’ve been saying “people”, remember that producers are people too. In fact, producers are often more governed by the sort of bean-counting, cost-minimizing behavior that carbon taxes are meant to influence in the first place.
> Also none of this helps with a UBI.
I agree, for reasons I’ve outlined elsewhere. I don’t really care since I see them as separate issues though.