We have an infinite money printing machine. We don't need access to any capital. That's not what the carbon tax is about. We need to change behavior. We need everyone that uses carbon to pay for its use (including the externalities) so that they stop using it as much as they are. This is why poor people can't be exempt. This is why the rich can't just pay for it. We all need a massive increase in the cost of everything that touches carbon (read everything) so we start driving to the next city once per year instead of every weekend, so that we start eating a BLT once a month instead of twice a week (a lot of heart issues down here in the south for a reason), and the list goes on.

Yeah, people should never say “we have no capital” when I see billions being used to buy bonds and prop up the stock market. It’s just ridiculous

>when I see billions being used to buy bonds and prop up the stock market. It’s just ridiculous

Because the former doesn't really cause inflation (it just sits on the bank's balance sheets), whereas printing money for infrastructure projects is.

A carbon tax is a non starter in democratic countries because we have seen over and over again that raising the price of motor fuel is political suicide. Canada had to back off on a program that offered a carbon tax back as a rebate. Similar outcome in France with Yellow vest protest movement. Many countries have tried to get rid of fuel subsidies only to spark middle class street protests. In the US the main election issue in 2022 will be "inflation" which for many voters is the price of gas. Carbon taxes simply do not work in the real world.

Wow

That's exactly what carbon tax is. Some companies will be exempt, others will be issuing "carbox tax loans". Only regular people will suffer with this

Do you understand you're saying give even more money to the people that have been leading the world to its destruction, so they will make it better

> We need to change behavior. We need everyone that uses carbon to pay for its use (including the externalities) so that they stop using it as much as they are. This is why poor people can't be exempt. This is why the rich can't just pay for it. We all need a massive increase in the cost of everything that touches carbon (read everything)

This is a pro-climate and anti-human policy. Do you care more about human beings or the amount of CO2 in the air?

There are still billions of people who have no electricity. Let's get them closer to our standard of living before we make everything more expensive for them.

Well, guess you want both eternal exponential growth for everybody, as well as a healthy planet to live on, but without any sort of compromise whatsoever.

A pro-human stance includes concern for the environment that humans live in. So I do want a healthy planet to live on.

Making everything cost more for everyone...doesn't sound like much of a compromise

I don't think you really understand what cost means in this case. Or a compromise.

Thinking that cost just means paying more -> bad is a very simplistic way to look at things.

Cost, especially via taxation, means setting aside a part of our productivity as a planet towards making sure we don't destroy ourselves. Everybody should contribute because everyone has skin in the game. By taxing CO2 specifically, you force people towards choosing more sustainable choices automatically.

Understand that you can't have a completely free market and an environment in which you want to live.

> an environment in which you want to live.

The environment you are proposing is unlivable. When you are living on less than $2 a day, things costing more is a matter of life and death.

Your fellow humans need more sources of reliable energy, not less.

That's not going to work. A lot of people (and industries) rely on cars to do their jobs. It's a lot of low-income households who rely most on cars because they live in remote areas due to housing costs and have to commute to city centers to find work. Such a tax would cause a huge backlash in large parts of the population in any country and the government who enacts it would be quickly disbanded. We need subsidies to pay for the transitions (pay for changing people's heating, buying them electric cars, etc.). Financing this shouldn't be a problem for most developed countries at the current interest rates.

I'm all in favor of subsidies to help the disadvantaged, as a general matter of principle. But fundamentally, disrupting people's lifestyles is the point. Yes, it's going to radically shift the economics of all kinds of things, including commuting. That's exactly what needs to happen. There's got to be a big rebalancing, which is hopefully the sort of thing that the free market is good at. What we need to do is make sure there are enough safety nets and wealth redistribution so that no one gets left behind - again, as a general principle, not just over this one issue.

All change is going to disproportionately impact the disadvantaged. But I don't think we can let that be an argument against change in general.

People would rather have their lifestyles disrupted by global warming.

Yes, rich people in temperate zones would. I’m not so sure about poor people in the tropics though.

You are right, a carbon tax without a fair and progressive redistribution is doomed to fail. This is partially why we had the "yellow vest" mouvement in France

We definitely need public financing — and especially things like HVAC should be table-stakes since it's also an effective jobs program — but we also need those ever-increasing taxes. Most of those people commuting in remote areas use high-emission, low-mileage vehicles for fashion reasons and they can afford to do so because the costs of that lifestyle have been heavily subsidized for decades.

If we instituted a vehicle weight / mileage tax (to fund road repair as EVs cut into the already wildly inadequate gas tax) and send a message that gas prices will never be cheaper in the future, that would change rapidly because there wouldn't be any way to fool yourself into thinking that you could afford that huge SUV which has been keeping you broke for years. It takes a lot to disturb a deeply-entrenched status quo and I think taxes are key, but I would ramp them in slower: set a floor on the cost for a barrel of oil and increase it annually so the writing is on the wall but there's time to make major capital expenditures.

The political backlash is a real problem, especially with the knowledge that the simple solutions like giving people financial assistance for replacing high-emissions vehicles would be met with a well-funded deluge of bad faith attacks (you can just hear the “why are they giving away Teslas to people who didn't earn them!” ads now). I suspect continued subsidies for things like EVs and solar would be possible but I wonder whether there could also be a low-rate loan subsidy program, especially for homeowners and businesses looking to electrify things like heaters, boilers, etc.

That's why to be politically viable any carbon emissions tax would have to be phased in gradually over many years. That would give people adequate time to adjust their lifestyles and purchase more efficient vehicles. The average car in the US is 12 years old so the phase in period has to be longer than that.

> That's not going to work. A lot of people (and industries) rely on cars to do their jobs

Unfortunately economic contraction is going to essential if we are going to reduce GHG emissions. We've tried the "full steam ahead, green energy will catch up!" approach for decades and it emissions have only gotten worse.

Don't forget those same people that would suffer from not having cars will suffer even more under the worse case climate scenarios.

The chance of the electorate asking their representatives to impose punitive taxes on them has no chance of happening in the US.

Hence absent a miracle technology that had all the benefits of fossil fuels and more but none of the drawbacks was the only solution. But since that has not yet happened, the situation is kind of bleak.

It would be great if we could deal with excess CO2 at the source, but if we can't then we have to work other aspects of the problem.

We don't need to raise capital. We don't need taxes to pay for the renewable and adaptive work we need to do. Taxes are strictly punitive and saying we need to raise taxes to raise funds is not only wrong, but delays action.

Wow, nice realistic solution! This will definitely not cause a major financial crisis. You should run for office.

I mean a "financial crisis" next to extinguishing most life on earth doesn't really seem like a choice to worry about.

Seeing as how the global financial system is a thing we all kind of just made up.

What good is finance when we're dead?

Further, the global financial system is based on the notion of perpetual and steady (if volatile) growth. That's the core tenet of the entire system, underpinning everything from inflation to basic employment.

By implication, this requires an infinite human population on Earth on an infinite timescale.

The still very young global financial system and everything in it is and always has been a Ponzi scheme.

Exactly this. There needs to more understanding about the negative consequences of inflationary monetary system. Absolutely scarce money, i.e. bitcoin, is the only solution to this problem. Scarce money forces to innovate in order to grow.

its also kind of not either or. how do you think the market is going to manage the kind of shocks and structural changes ahead.

every year from now on is going to get worse.

I do see your point, and I've thought about this consequence a lot.

I sincerely don't think it would cause a financial collapse, as ridiculous as that might sound.

200% plus 10% compounding per annum is the lowest I think we could reasonably go in order to be in with a chance of reaching peak carbon by 2030.

It forces deeply painful changes on the world, but no more painful than is necessary to avoid the collapse of civilisation.

The problem until now is that people haven't been given the justification to go along with the astronomical task being asked (i.e. Stop burning fossil fuels immediately or we all die).

If COVID, and the 2008 crisis, have taught me anything it's that the economy is unbelievably fragile to shocks. Trying to levy huge taxes in a democracy is DOA for that reason. Most Americans will do just about anything to avoid another recession -- that's food off their tables.

One interesting question: say we tried that MIT economist's plan where you have a hefty carbon tax but give the entire thing back as a tax rebate[1]. That'd get a direct deposit/check arriving (hopefully frequently) and send a message that the faster you lower your emissions, the more other people are giving you free money. People don't like paying taxes but they allow love to get the better side of a deal.

1. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/28/196355493/econ...

This is exactly how Canada's federal carbon tax is structured.

Citizens get rebates based on income, so poorer individuals get larger rebates as a percent of income and can actually come out ahead even with rising prices due to the carbon tax.

More wealthy citizens will (due to lifestyle differences) pay more in taxes than they get back, but they also have the means to change their lifestyles/make different choices, so they could end up in a spot where they use less carbon and so also come out ahead.

It's a very simple mechanism to modify behaviour and does do in a relatively equitable way.

Quite frankly, that is why democracy will fail us. Most Americans will do just about anything to avoid their income falling for 10-20 years but do just about nothing to avoid the global climate from torpedoing the world's biomes, food production systems, weather patterns, coastlines and coastal cities, decimating species diversity, etc. over 10-100 years.

We could be saved by technological or business breakthrough from an individual, or we could be saved by authoritarianism, but the preference you just described is why we're probably fucked if we hope for a political solution in western democracies (at least the US).

The so-called "invisible hand" has already gotten the US on the right trajectory, with the government nudging it along. That's all we can hope for, along with 330 million people making better decisions.

If that's true, then democracy has to go.

When the world is thrown into complete chaos by the climate crisis, at least we will have saved the damn economy, right?

"Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B5-lDJWCUAAwfya?format=jpg

When will that happen? 2012?