China has a higher percentage of its energy coming from low emission sources than the US and single handedly accounts for 45% of worldwide annual investment in renewables, 3 times that of the US.
Carbon taxes are not sin taxes meant to disincentivize carbon production, they are a means to pay for carbon capture. If you can't afford to store the carbon released from burning a ton of coal, you can't afford to burn that ton of coal. Of course any new tax is going to meet friction, but what is will if not the ability to overcome friction when necessary?
They’re in fact very progressive - the poor consume less than the rich, and rich “hobbies” have greater proportional CO2 emissions - think supercars, yachting, flying business or private. So the poor will receive more in CO2 “income” than they’ll pay in CO2 tax.
The only difficulty is border control - how to prevent manufacturers simply escaping to CO2-tax-free jurisdictions and importing the finished goods - but with free trade getting a bad rep, maybe viable solutions will emerge.
In the higher up the income distribution the percentage of a person's income spent on consumption decreases, as highest earners typically put their money into wealth generating assets. So a smaller percentage of their income is actually taxed.
If you make 30k a year, you are spending everything you make on essentials. They're for the full amount of your earnings will be taxed by any consumption tax. If you make 300K a year, even if you spend 2/3 of it on consumption you are still being taxed at a lower rate.
The US generates 2x more emissions per capita (15.5 vs 7 tons). Australia generates more than the US (17), and Canada even more than Australia (18.5).
We got plenty of work to do ourselves before we look to China.
The best fair first approximation to this is for each country's share to be proportional to its population. That can then be refined with some sort of emissions trading system so that countries that want to outsource high emission industries to others can provide the emissions budget to allow that work.
Anything other than a per capita first approximation requires deciding that some countries simply are not going to be allowed to develop beyond third world status.
At projected 2050 population levels of 10b, and 25GT/year emissions, per capita emissions allowance is 2.5t/year. There is no industrialized country with this level of emissions, the lowest being Sweden, Switzerland and France at 4.5, 4.7 and 5.13. These countries have moved >90% of their electrical production to nuclear and renewables and cut their emissions in half compared to the 1990s. Possibly they are also externalizing their food and industrials production.
B. What is 'fair' share? Population as of 2020? 2050? 1950? Land area? Forest mass?
The most obvious issue is population. Hard to believe, but in 1950, at the beginning of the current Golden Era, world population was a mere 2.5 billion people. At those population levels everybody on Earth could have had afforded the industrialized lifestyle of Japan, Germany or Netherlands, with about 10 CO2t/capita emissions.
The US, Canada and Australia together make up roughly 20% of global emissions with approximately 5% of the global population. Regardless of how you slice it these countries need to take serious action.
You’ll notice that per-capita emissions are highly correlated with the list of countries that export fossil fuels.
I agree with your point but per capita emissions alone is a gross oversimplification.
Let's just focus on plugging the latter shall we, while we all go down together.
China is doing proportionally more to combat climate change than we are.
>70% of emissions come from energy consumption. 35% of all emissions is electricity and heat
There are so many "easy wins" here. Better insulation and other end user improvements (e.g. heat pumps), stricter efficiency standards and mandates, carbon taxes on the most polluting industries and generation methods (i.e. make it unprofitable to restart an old coal power plant to mine bitcoin), etc.
>I'm not suggesting to do nothing, but a smug mentality of "people are just not willing to do the obviously right solution because they are stupid" doesn't solve anything either.
There's not an obviously right solution to everything, but there are obviously right solutions to many things, and we are still choosing not to do any of them.
My house is ~100 years old structural brick. The insulation on most of the vertical walls is just the plaster, air gap, and 9” of brick. As we remodel (very slowly), we insulate with spray foam, but that remodeling is never driven by energy concerns. It’s vastly cheaper for me to keep heating the bulk of the house with natural gas than it ever would be to take money from investments and turn them into insulation and new plaster walls.
I’ve had insulation and HVAC contractors out. To totally redo just the vertical walls and change the HVAC to locally electric is a six-figure proposition and by the time it’s done, the first digit won’t be a “1”. The payback period on that is infinite if you charge yourself 2% interest (with energy priced as it is today).
This is why we need to change the economics of the situation. If we raise taxes on the very wealthy, Jeff Bezos might not get to go to space, but we could insulate a few hundred thousand houses.
If you create a large pile of government giveaway money but keep energy cheap, people will take the money and continue to use a lot of energy. (I’ll save money on heating and use it to keep the house 74°F instead of 69°F in the winter or to take a vacation to a tropical location.)
Bezos, Musk, and Gates aren’t the problem here. 100s of millions of Americans and a couple billion people worldwide who could all save 2-5% of their footprint are the problem. Incentives need to nudge them each a little rather than confiscation and redistribution of the wealth of a few dozen people. It can be comfortable to think “I don’t need to change; we just need to tax the ultra rich”, but the reality is closer to the opposite.
Why would we keep energy cheap? The economics of that also needs to change. I agree that we should also raise carbon-intensive energy prices, and do our best to structure it to penalize disproportionate users (e.g. construction costs for massive houses and buildings). I also don't understand how you could "take the money" for improvements like insulation and then still use more energy, unless you just mean fraud in general.
Change also needs to happen at a societal level. We need to tax extreme amounts of wealth, because that wealth came from society, so the burden is on them to help. On a global level, we could also do more to help developing and industrializing nations. Imagine a green version of the Marshall Plan.
“We should tax billionaires and raise taxes on carbon energy” is effective overwhelmingly because of the second part. You could nearly equally well say “we should chew more bubble gum and raise taxes on carbon energy”.
(It’s fine to have a separate debate on billionaire tax policy, but it seems tenuous at best to link it to energy policy.)
- 1/3 of emissions come China which has an autocratic leadership accountable neither to its people or the global community.
- 70% of emissions come from energy consumption. 35% of all emissions is electricity and heat, and another 15% is construction + manufacturing.
- Even if every mode of transportation was fully electric supplied by 100% nuclear supplied electricity, global emissions would only drop by 15%. (i.e. transportation only accounts for 15% of global emissions).
Have you stopped heating/cooling your house? Moved to a small apartment? Stopped driving a car?
Carbon taxes will also meet friction because:
1. They are actually regressive income taxes. The bottom 90% of the income distribution spend most of their wealth on necessary consumption (food, rent, getting to work).
2. Most of the goods taxes (electricity, heat, transportation) are inelastic. People may chose to purchase less consumer items, eat less meat, but they are still going to heat their homes and drive to work.
I'm not suggesting to do nothing, but a smug mentality of "people are just not willing to do the obviously right solution because they are stupid" doesn't solve anything either.