Then you would be entering into a "trade war" with the United States - which most countries aren't going to be able to do.

China and the EU can, and should. "Polluter pays" should become the standard policy in international trade in numerous other ways, too.

China is the biggest polluter and they plan to increase their co2 emissions to at least 2030 so I don't think you'll find an ally there.

Big polluter because it's a giant country. Per capita it's quite low, and there is no reason a big country should be punished why a smaller country that does significantly worse shouldn't. According to that logic if they would split into lots of smaller countries it suddenly isn't an issue anymore.

China already leveled off in 2011.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=USA~IND...

Imposing tariffs based on pollution is already GATT-legal. AFAIK it's something countries avoid for all the other reasons why countries avoid tariffs.

Wouldn't "user pays" be more logical. I think it is quite dishonest to blame China when consumption happens in Europe or USA... All of the pollution should be transported in calculations where consumption happens.

When China bids to manufacture something for the world market, a variety of things go into the price they can bid: labor, shipping, materials, and pollution, chiefly (there is also research, facilities maintenance, etc). The main factors which give them an advantage are labor and pollution. Their labor advantage is internal but their pollution advantage -- the portion dumped into water or air -- they get by extracting value from a shared account. In countries with stricter pollution laws companies can't rob their neighbors to win a bid.

That being said, tariffs and other mechanisms meant to force the pollution cost back onto producers really end up being paid largely by consumers anyway. You can't tax citizens of another country. So the tariff taxes citizens of your own country. The cost gets back to the producer country indirectly in that they sell less stuff, but every time the tax is paid it is paid inside the country imposing the tariff by citizens of that country. So it works more or less according to your suggested mechanism.

The end result should be largely the same regardless of whether the externality compensation takes the form of an import tariff or user-facing retail tax. Either way customer prices rise and manufacturer/importer/seller margins drop. Tariffs are a blunt tool, but so are most consumer-end taxes as well. But coming up with the sort of Pigovian precision instrument, that attempts to fairly reflect the actual lifecycle externalities of a good or a service, is probably going to be almost impossible for several reasons.

Then you would be charging people who have no control over the production. The producer nation sets the laws and standards for their facilities.

They do have the option to pick up option that has less attached taxes. Or not to buy something.

Who imposes the taxes then? The exporting country (China) is unlikely to do it. The importing county is only likely to do it if the government and people support it. The problem is that even with a tax on the import, polluting in a developing nation would likely be cheaper than not polluting anywhere else. Many items do not have options to buy from various countries (economies of scale usually consolidate factories and leave little room for competitors). Not to mention that drastically reducing consumption (your comment about not buying) will cause most economies to fail since we are consumer based.

Make taxes big enough to make pollution too expensive even in cheap countries?

Buying less, but more expensive because of less polluting manufacturing methods is the answer. Economy will still keep going.

"Economy will still keep going."

How so? If you are adding crushing taxes, then you're likely to see a downturn in production and consumption, which generally results in a weak or shrinking economy.

Polluting taxes will promote spending on less polluting ways to manufacture. Or better quality goods that put out same amount of pollution, but you end up buying them not as frequently.

Let's take a hipothetical sweater as an example.

Now I buy a €20 sweater every 2 years. Let's say pollution tax would be €10. Suddenly it becomes €30 sweater and my €10/year sweater budget becomes €15/year. Instead, I could buy a nice sweater for €40 (+€10 tax) and wear it for 5 years. Now I'm back at original €10/year budget.

Economy wise, most of the chain is now just making nicer stuff that takes more resources. Aside from truck driver. Who is now moving twice as much sweaters. But €10 tax ideally would go to environment-improving projects and some drivers will make a living in those new sectors.

To a certain extend, absolutely. Much of the richer EU states cause and have caused quite a bit of pollution and without a serious shift in consumption, I don't believe we can achieve our goals.

However, industry is without a doubt a massive resource user. Modern methods in manufacturing can save significant amounts of energy, water, and more. As China is the main producer in many instances, a change also needs to happen there to go from heavy polluting to less polluting methods.

it's the same thing, the tax increases the price for the buyer.

At the end of the day, it's always "user pays".

Well, as an unhappily former EU citizen I don't think getting into arguments at all is an option for the country I live in. :-(

China may be on the accord, but they still have abysmal pollution right now. So currently, it would be a trade war with China too.

This brings up something that I don't understand. How can there be candidates that say they support the environment, support worker rights, and support free trade with places such as China? Laborers are treated like crap and pollution is rampant in China. Promoting free trade seems to oppose the other two positions since there's more pollution in the developing nations that we outsource out manufacturing to and that labor in our country can't compete with the lower wages of those developing countries, partly due to lower living standard but also due to fewer worker protections and even safety equipment.

Free trade raises the standard for everyone. Today China has those issues, but free trade is raising their living standard. As standards of living raise people find pollution is negatively affecting them and so they solve the problem locally.

Of course the downside free trade allows production to move to places where there are no controls because non-local pollution both less affects any individual, and because international politics come into play trying to solve it, and those who have a bad standard of living see this as the rich trying to keep them down by not letting them compete.

The last might sound negative about free trade ever solving pollution, but it actually isn't. China and India are both reaching the tipping point where enough people are rich enough to care about pollution that they are doing something about it. Half the world population is already rich enough to care, and that half also wants more stuff so there isn't enough poor places left for this cycle of moving production to repeat for many more cycles. Also, every time production moves they bring the latest technology - China never had the cities full of coal smoke stacks spewing black smoke into the air like the US and Europe had 120 years ago. (they are big into coal, but their coal has always been cleaner just because some cleaner coal technology is also cheaper in the long run)

> As standards of living raise people find pollution is negatively affecting them and so they solve the problem locally.

This works if the problem is local and bothersome to the locals -- rusting drums leaking poison or heaps of trash. Carbon dioxide and methane are invisible and odorless and instantly become everyone's problem, so we can't expect this mechanism to induce people to solve the problem locally.

You are yourself the counter example that proves you are wrong. People like you do in fact care about non-local pollution. there are steps: first you need to get far enough out of poverty that you can start thinking you can accept the lower standard of living not having poison around you is acceptable. When you don't have enough to eat or in danger of freezing to death (or other weather/nature related disasters) that poison is something you just stay away from - particularity if your job is with whoever is dumping it since making them clean up might me they don't pay you and then you can't eat. When you don't have those basic worries to you worry about more avoidable ones like local poison/pollution. Only after the above do non-local concerns matter.

It's all about perspective. Even the poor in developed nations have a much higher standard of living than the poor in developing nations. Most people only compare their situation with the situation of others in the same country/culture. So it's tough for most people to objectively say that they are doing well and would rather spend their limited money for a more expensive version of the same item. You also have human nature, where most people live nearly at their means, or even beyond them, rather than within them.

I guess I'm basically saying there tends to exist a lot of scope creep in each individual's definition of when local and basic concern have been met.

You are right that it basically just moves the pollution to the next developing country.

You are incorrect about your coal comment. You can see China spewing yellow smoke (it's an even dirtier type of coal than the two we have here). The cleaner tech only gets adopted if it's financially cheaper or has some other incentive like the government enforcing standard (which relies on the education/opinion of the people).

You didn't understand my coal comment. No surprise, it is hard to explain. Efficiency gains mean you burn less coal. The old boilers in 1900 were very inefficient. It is not very hard to build a modern boiler that is much more efficient, and thus uses less fuel. The coal might worse, but China is using far less to get the same energy out of it which means less pollution.

I can see that on a per Kw basis. You would also have to factor in what the electricity production is today vs in 1900 to make an accurate comparison. Total pollution output today may still be higher. For example, you might have quadrupled the efficiency but the demand may have increased ten times or more. So sure, they adopted a newer technology than 120 years ago and is cleaner, but it's also not the latest technology nor is it even close to the cleanest. Many of their plants are currently very dirty. They do have plans to upgrade in the future. Not to mention, it's not the cleanest option out there, even at the higher efficiency. For example, natural gas is cleaner and that tech has been around for a while. Even a lot of nuclear tech is about 60 years old.

"China never had the cities full of coal smoke stacks spewing black smoke into the air like the US and Europe had 120 years ago."

Please do a search for air quality alerts and deaths in china as well as for pictures of the smog. It is every bit as bad or even worse. The tech may ne more efficient but the scale and overall output has similar effects. Yes the smoke is a yellow color and not black, that is mostly due to the soft brown coal they use in some parts of the country rather than the anthracite or even bituminous coal we used.

The point was, US can do this too.

The EU is stating public consultations on energy taxation and a carbon border adjustment mechanism :

https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/news/commission-launch...

According to the timelines linked there, the public consultations on this just closed few weeks ago.

Which is unfortunate for me, because I wasn't aware that there are such consultations until your comment :(.

You cannot do that on a nation by nation basis as you will just push the pollution to other unregulated nations - although if done globally, this might work.

Originally the thought was to do this on a product by product basis, but unwinding supply chains is effectively impossible.

Actually, it's still pretty tough because some countries buy and rebrand products to slip around tariffs even now.

Doing so would raise the price of consumer products significantly, which will go down terribly in most rich, developed nations.

Since the Paris Agreement was non-binding, it's not really relevant. Anyway, would you accept a country that had states representing over 50% of the population in the Agreement? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Climate_Alliance

Does this include the past? Should we "tax" the US and Europe since they've been burning coal and diesel faster than everyone else for more than a century? Should we also favor countries like Kenya, who have burned zero coal historically and are currently some of the greenest countries in the world?