If we've learned anything from all of this it seems pretty clear that it'll start suggesting coal rolling videos and ads for a carbon fiber empty tube to replace your muffler.

Keep in mind that your car emits CO2 mainly from burning fuel.

Even if you don't care about CO2, you might want to care about burning less fuel. That stuff ain't free.

(And the beauty of CO2 taxes would be that they make worrying about fuel costs equivalent (or equivalent enough) to worrying about emissions.)

We have taxes already in the form of taxes on every gallon of gas that's sold. 50 cents or more per gallon depending on the area. It's great if you're rich and successful and work from home in tech to argue for higher taxes. Not so much when you have no choice but to travel for work and you have to spend several hundred dollars a month to do so.

I grew up in Europe. American petros prices (and petrol taxes) look extremely cheap to me in any case.

> Not so much when you have no choice but to travel for work and you have to spend several hundred dollars a month to do so.

People always have choices on the margin.

In any case, I am not arguing for a higher total tax burden. Eg I'd be very happy for the CO2 tax to be distributed equally to all voters. Or for petrol taxes to substitute for other government revenue.

Eg in my adopted home of Singapore there's a cap of about one million cars on the road total in the whole country. To operate a car, you need a Certificate of Entitlement (CoE). Each CoE is valid for ten years. Each month approximately 1% of CoE run out and are thus re-issued via an auction.

We also have pretty high pretrol taxes.

But overall government revenue is only about 15% of GDP.

I intended my post mainly tongue-in-cheek (hence the emoticon). I'll probably stick with the defaults unless it really takes me out of my way or does something like avoid freeways.

The beauty of CO2 taxes is that I pay more at the pump (at least till I can afford a Tesla) and the state gets an incentive to grift off of climate change.