I agree! Add the cost of CO2 into the price of gas. But don't ban inefficient speciality cars. I happen to be someone who really enjoys driving performance cars that happen to get really poor fuel economy. I have no problem paying the cost of the CO2 I generate. But I find it very irritating when people say we need to ban these cars outright.

> Add the cost of CO2 into the price of gas.

Is there a cost? I would say it is priceless - because we do not have any mechanism to funnel that money into undoing the CO2. And no, planting trees are not the opposite of taking oil from deep underground. Once that oil is out it remains in the above-surface carbon cycle. While it is underground it would never even be part of it. So any price would be made up - and just funneled to some interest group. The "compensation" does not actually compensate anything. This is the danger of only thinking in "money". I paid, problem magically solved!

We have that mechanism: carbon sequestration. It's what taxes on gasoline should be directly funding.

I like performance cars. They're neat. I don't agree that poorer people should shoulder a greater burden for societal adaptation to threats. If you have a high polluting performance vehicle, maybe it can be restricted in a normalizing fashion when used for transportation or recreation within some arbitrary boundary, like speed limits to some extent (though I'm aware of the caveats), but then if you can throw money at it anyway, you should at least for some time be able to take it to a track where they can set their own rules. I don't think physical performance limiters should be placed on vehicles at all, especially ones that are grandfathered in, but some people shouldn't have the ability to just disregard things in daily in daily life that the place has democratically decided upon only because the money is available. Or maybe it could be a condition of licensing within a certain area. Great you get the car, but can only drive it where you don't need valid insurance. If you want to drive it anyway, you need to have a limiter, or the car is impounded

> I don't agree that poorer people should shoulder a greater burden for societal adaptation to threats.

I don't get that? If do adopt a carbon tax, then the rich guy who wants to drive a performance car pays a lot more, than the poor person who take the bus.

> If you have a high polluting performance vehicle, maybe it can be restricted in a normalizing fashion when used for transportation or recreation within some arbitrary boundary, like speed limits to some extent [...]

That sounds awfully intrusive and full of loopholes, that only people who can afford expensive lobbyists and lawyers can exploit.

> [...] but some people shouldn't have the ability to just disregard things in daily in daily life that the place has democratically decided upon only because the money is available.

How would paying your democratically-decided-on carbon tax be the same as disregarding anything?

I didn't say anything about a carbon tax. I was talking more about agreed upon restrictions that can't simply have money thrown at them to just keep doing what they're doing. This carries over to a number of different policy decisions that have naive approached to truly reducing them. Like the real estate market, noise pollution, other pollution. Put another way, would you be chill about the local high-polluting company continuing to dump sewage into water ways if they're paying some fee? Probably not. People driving performance cars around can already afford the extra expense of having them, either for status or fun or whatever, I don't necessarily want to make it even more exclusive. A different example would be those disgusting coal-rollers that fuckheads drive. Do I want them to be able to drive in the city because they can afford to sink the cost and do it anyway? No.

>I don't get that? If do adopt a carbon tax, then the rich guy who wants to drive a performance car pays a lot more, than the poor person who take the bus.

But the poor guy with a beat 20 year old car in a badly insulated rental pays more than the rich guy with his Tesla and energy neutral villa.

Good, do we care about the planet or cheap access to highly emitting vehicles.

“Who cares about all those poors, right?”

“Who cares about climate change when it means I’ll have to take the bus or apply for some electric car subsidy, right?”

Please don't argue in favour of electric car subsidies (or any other subsidies).

That's just needless paperwork, and never catches all use cases. Eg the guy who walks doesn't get an electric car subsidy. Or the guy who practices hypermiling on his ICE, vs the guy who drives his ICE like a maniac. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermiling

Much easier to just apply an emission tax (or a cap-and-trade program) and let people figure it out by themselves without extra paperwork and government favouritism.

Why not tax the rich more and use that money to help the poor emit less?

Eh, that's what eg income taxes are for.

If you want to do redistribution to help the poor, the impact of the overall tax system is important. You don't need to make every single tax progressive.

Individual taxes, especially sin taxes, should be designed to do their job as efficiently as possible.

That doesn’t work. As long as the cheap option is available that’s what people will use.

Unless you’re suggesting we tax the cheap option, in which case you’re saying the same thing.

I'm suggesting we tax the luxurious option and use that money to improve the cheap option.

I agree we cannot burden poorer people. I think the least-worst way to handle the whole situation is with a carbon-tax and dividend.

There are a lot of valid arguments against ethanol, but performance is not one of them. If performance is the primary virtue, all performance vehicles should be burning 100% ethanol, and if in a place where sugarcane can be turned into ethanol, being carbon neutral. In other places, pay a corn-carbon tax.

It sounds like you’re mad that it goes fast and don’t care about taxing actual emissions.

Making egregious polluting a rich-only club? Outright banning sounds more attractive.

This is accomplished via gas taxes. If you drive this car only 100 miles a year, you're still emitting a lot less CO2 than driving a Prius 10,000 miles a year.

It's not really accomplished unless the gas tax pulls that CO2 back down from the atmosphere.

Per the CDC, A typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.

The weighted average price per ton for carbon credits from forestry and land-use projects that reduce emissions or remove carbon from the atmosphere has been on a steady upward path, rising from $4.33 per credit in 2019 to $4.73 per credit so far in 2021, with a spike to $5.60 per credit in 2020.

So, spend $35/year or if you want to get fancy, the cost of 1 tank of gas per year to offset your carbon footprint from driving and enjoy a guilt-free year.

Or we could fold that cost into gas, if you use 1 tank a week, 10/gallons a tank, that would be less than $0.02 as a carbon tax credit.

I would be all for that.

But, if you raised the price of gas $0.50 and funneled all of that money into funding carbon capture industries, I would also be all for that, and at that price point more people would search for public transportation or purchase EV's so that is a double win.

But then again, these taxes would disproportionately affect the middle and lower classes in suburban and rural communities so that would make life far more difficult on people who already have it tough enough and manufacturers would probably shovel any taxes you put on them directly to the consumers as well, so I would say it's almost as if there isn't a single simple fix to the issue and only a multipronged approach that takes into account dozens of moving variables rolled out over time is the only viable solution.

That closes the loop, for sure. But doesn't a carbon tax address your exact complaint, in that externalities should be internalised? It takes the externality (CO2 is bad because global warming) and makes it a cost for the person performing the activity (CO2 is bad because gas is expensive, and useage is therefore to be limited).

The cost of the pollution is it's effect on the environment and everyone living in it. Just collecting taxes does not address that. The tax would have to actually undue the pollution to eliminate the externality.

Then driving a Prius doesn’t accomplish anything either.

Driving a Prius for fun on the weekends is less damaging than driving a Viper. You might not get as much fun done though.

A pigovian tax works, even if the proceeds are not used to fight the externalities.

Pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere might or might not be a good idea. But that's a cost/benefit analysis that's independent of the carbon tax take.

Apples and oranges. Something being driven 10k miles a year is being used for daily life activities, something being driven 100 miles is not.

Consider what job it's doing, not what arbitrary market category it fits in.

What, exactly, is the car that's being driven for 100 miles doing? Is it something the 10k mile car couldn't do even better? Is it something that even legitimately needs to be done?

I agree this is a thing that can be done, but I disagree it's a job that it's doing - because stating its a job usually means there is some ultimate purpose to it.

I'm responding more to the point that gas taxes are some kind of effective solution and that category-based comparison is even relevant. Climate change demands we think outside categories and see what kinds of 'jobs to be done' we have to meet our needs and thrive, and then look at all available options to lower carbon footprint around those[1]. And look at some of these 'jobs' as less valuable than others, e.g. conspicuous consumption vs commuting to work to feed your family.

Also a more specific issue here is car manufacturing itself is like 25% of the carbon footprint of a vehicle, so regardless of use it's still doing damage.

[1] e.g. a solution may be that we take public transport, or micromobility, or relocate so we don't need to drive as far, or videoconference, or any number of other things that examine the full range of options we have to reach the goal.

> Climate change demands we think outside categories and see what kinds of 'jobs to be done' we have to meet our needs and thrive

No it doesn’t. That is what authoritarians do under the guise of climate change when they just want control.

Climate change demands we reduce CO2 in aggregate. It is better to tax all gas equally to force a reduction in its use and keep increasing the tax until its emissions are negligible. No exceptions, full stop.

Having bureaucrats look at 'jobs to be done' sounds awfully intrusive and inefficient, and needlessly morally arbitrary.

Just do a gas tax (or carbon tax) and be done with it. If you are worried about some specific use cases, just give those deserving people money so they can pay their taxes with that.

It's really, really, really common to have single purpose trucks that go about that far. Site-specific fuel trucks, plow trucks, etc.

"legitimately needs to be done" - who decides what is "legitimate"?

> What, exactly, is the car that's being driven for 100 miles doing? Is it something the 10k mile car couldn't do even better?

Being faster? Being more fun? Giving you social status in your in-group?

Can we at least be honest?

Come on. Gas taxes are hilariously regressive. The people—ALL the people—who can afford this kind of dumbass vehicle and who are willing to commit the offense of buying and operating it will never, ever be affected or restricted or motivated by any piddly gas taxes.

So, no. No. Of course it's not actually accomplished by gasoline taxes. That's a fantasy.

If you made gas taxes 1-2 orders of magnitude more progressive than they are right now, that would be a tiny start.

> The people—ALL the people—who can afford this kind of dumbass vehicle

The people who can afford 272k for a car are a vanishingly small percentage of the world population. In this category of people wasting money, this is one of the least impactful activities. For comparison, they might also consider chartering a jet to the Alps for skiing, renting a yacht for a week in the Mediterranean, going on African safari, etc.

> So, no. No. Of course it's not actually accomplished by gasoline taxes

You do know there is a point where gas taxes can be raised high enough that it just pays for full carbon offset/capture, right? At that point you’re just having a fit that rich people exist, which has nothing to do with solving climate change.

How are gas taxes regressive? They seem perfectly flat to me, at least in relation to amount of petrol bought and burned.

> How are gas taxes regressive?

As with most ad valorem (or fixed per unit) consumption taxes, because consumption as a share of income declines with increasing income, so total and marginal tax share drops with greater income.

Yes, like every sales tax, VAT, etc used everywhere around the world except for super liberal places like Montana.

Calling these taxes regressive just a socially acceptable way for people to say “I don’t want to shoulder any burden for this”.

> Yes, like every sales tax, VAT, etc used everywhere around the world except for super liberal places like Montana.

Yes, sales taxes and VATs are regressive, though in many cases that is made somewhat more nuanced by selective exclusion of basic necessities on which the poor focus a disproportionate share of consumption; when that's done, they are progressive at the low end shifting to regressive higher. This kind of tax that puts it's heaviest burden somewhere between the above average income segment of the working class and the petit bourgeois middle class is somewhat more popular than straight regressive taxation (when you take into account payroll taxes and favorable taxation on LTCG and certain other income disproportionately concentrated among the very rich, US taxes on income also largely break this way).

> Calling these taxes regressive just a socially acceptable way for people to say “I don’t want to shoulder any burden for this”.

Er, no. I actually favor heavier gas taxes (or carbon taxes) as a pigovian tax, but I think that the overall system of taxation should be asjusted so the net effect is not to to decrease progressivity (which, given that I have above average income, probably means I shoulder the burden of that as well as of the additional gas tax, so really the opposite of what you suggest). An individual tax desirable for other reasons being regressive is an addressivle issue.

Actually, they are regressive. Calling them regressive, therefore, is just a statement of fact.

If you want to project your biases against poor people onto others, fine, but let's be clear that that's what you are doing.

> Actually, they are regressive.

Read my comment again. I didn’t say they weren’t.

> If you want to project your biases against poor people onto others

Are you calling my criticism of armchair economists a bias against poor people? Do you know that most armchair economists are not poor people?

I'm not sure that's true about consumption in general?

But in any case, I don't think it matters too much whether individual taxes are progressive or regressive or flat. That consideration only really makes a difference for the overall tax system. Individual taxes can be designed to be as efficient as possible, as long as the overall system is as progressive/flat/regressive as desired.

Huh? Are gas taxes a priced in externality or a way to punish the rich?

Asking the rich to pay even a fraction of their fair share is not "punishing" the rich.

Just so we're clear, punishing them would involve, say, jailing them or confiscating all but $50k or so of their net worth and then making them work at Burger King for a month or two. That would be punishing.

Asking for a more progressive and fair tax system does not "punish" anyone.

Huh? What do externalities have to do with that?

There surely needs to be some incorporation of need into the calculations. The rich control enough of our resources that they are unlikely to be put off by a tax, whereas everyday people would be crippled by taxes high enough to make a difference.

Do you think this principle applies more generally? Tax incentives only work on poor people?

I think tax incentives (and indeed fines) proportional to wealth/income work on everyone. But if you make it flat then obviously they're going to have an outsized effect on the poor.

Whether tax incentives need to be larger to work on richer people is an empirical question we can look into.

We don't need to ban anything, just make it cost what it costs.

Agreed! Tax people according to their body fat percentage:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-food-climate-obesity/obes...

I'm not getting this one, could you dumb it down for me? (Not sure if it has something to do with not being a native speaker or not.)

In economics, an externality [0] is a cost that is not paid for by the buyer or the seller but generally society bears the cost. For example, when buying a pollution machine - the cost to the environment may not be factored into the purchase price despite it being there.

Internalizing the externalities refers adding an additional cost to the purchase price to cover for the externality. In the example above for the pollution machine, this could be a carbon tax or a carbon offset.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

Understood, thanks!