What? No.
We don't care about the extraction.
If oil must be burned, don't care whether it's Oil from wells or Oil from biowaste.
If it's oil for burning an engine, and we need that engine to operate for some economic reason - then we actually want people to consume the cheapest version.
We don't want to make people jump through hurdles to 'run an engine that we need to run' for no reason.
We may want to make sure that running that engine is economically essential, in which case keeping prices high, or, by some regulation.
The act of 'extraction' is not a problem, there's not much negative from that.
Other than geostrategic issues (i.e. Russia) we don't care where it comes from.
What we want to do is tax the fuel itself - not emissions.
The emissions are a direct function of the fuel.
We know X litres of gas will create Y tonnes for Co2 and that's it. So tax the fuel instead of getting people to figure out emissions.
Oil that is used for other reasons, we don't really care about.
We could put a fuel tax, and a natural gas tax up right now - we already have mechanisms in place for that.
Yes, we really do. There is vastly more carbon in the atmosphere than a hundred years ago. Where did it come from?
You can burn oil made from biowaste all day and all night and it won't raise CO2 levels one little bit. Why? Because all that carbon came from the atmosphere to begin with! All the carbon in living things comes from plants, who get it from atmospheric CO2. It's a closed cycle.
The problem is solely, 100%, taking carbon that has been safely in the ground for millions of years, and through a convoluted process putting it in the atmosphere and never retrieving it. And then being shocked that atmospheric CO2 levels are returning to what they were millions of years ago, in the period aptly known as the "Carboniferous".
To sustain our current per-capita energy consumption beyond our accumulated biomass stores, the limiting factor is land area. There's probably not enough space on Earth to devote to growing biomass purely for energy. Solar panels reach 10 times the generated power per unit area, easily, and we can do even better by exploiting energy accumulation that happens without technology, like wind.
"You can burn oil made from biowaste all day and all night and it won't raise CO2 levels one little bit. Why? Because all that carbon came from the atmosphere to begin with! All the carbon in living things comes from plants, who get it from atmospheric CO2. It's a closed cycle."
Oil comes from plants and animals, crushed under the weight of the earth, it's also a 'natural cycle' - but that doesn't matter at all.
"The problem is solely, 100%, taking carbon that has been safely in the ground for millions of years, a"
No, it has nothing to do with that at all.
It doesn't matter where or how the carbon gets into the air.
Anything that is going to be used as a fuel, we tax, relative to the amount of CO2 it emits, and that's that.
If as it turns out it's incredibly more efficient to burn 'biofuel' than it is to extract Oil - fine. But it's probably not the case.
So. If you take carbon out of the ground, and expect to see it floating in the air, you should be taxed. That's the idea.
But does this make sense? Just how much of the carbon in oil really is destined for the air? How much of the wood? How much of the stone? Or is there some other chain I'm missing? How much carbon would be sequestered in plants that produce biofuel? How much of a net negative is ethonol production anyway? What about other fuels? This subject seems complex to me.
You seem to think all this is wrong, and it could be! I really would be interested to hear where the logic breaks down.
It's not efficient as an energy cycle.
Not even considering the fact that wood burns in a very 'dirty' way and would require a lot of energy to 'clean' the emissions.
You have to be careful when you speak of "efficiency". You have to specify, with respect to what expended resource, and what desired goal? If we say the expended resource is "land area" and the desired goal is "powering all of civilization", then indeed the the "efficiency" of growing trees and burning them is not so great, compared to say solar panels. But if the expended resource is "environmental damage" and the desired goal is "heating a cabin in the woods", burning tree wood is extremely efficient.
So it seems the real point is that it's "dirty"? We'd have to clean... what? Particle emissions? Most areas I see woodburning done have high quality air, low particle counts. Because their density is so low.
This keeps happening. The core rebuttable to dTal's argument is being left unstated. You keep saying it's wrong, you keep not saying why.
There are not that many dead trees, they don't release all of their Co2, you don't get that much energy, and it's a 'dirty emission'. Burning Hydrogen gives you CO2 and H20 - nice and clean. Burning wood gives you a lot of bad things.
But I think that it's accurate to say that when you burn wood, you're emitting CO2 that would have been released as the wood decayed anyway. In that sense, you're not really contributing to climate change. This doesn't count any energy used in harvesting and transporting the wood, which of course could contribute to emissions.
To use another example, if you grow sugar cane, and using green energy sources, turn it into ethanol, and burn that in a car instead of gasoline, that's basically carbon neutral. If you hadn't grown the sugar cane, something else would have grown there, and decayed, and released the carbon into the atmosphere.
It would be valid to argue that if we had let the field turn into a forest, it would trap more carbon than the sugar cane would. And we should let forests regrow, where we can! But it's a one-time thing -- once the forest is grown, it would stay stable in the amount of carbon captured there. To continue to trap carbon, we'd need to keep harvesting the trees and doing something with them to permanently take them out of the carbon cycle, like turning them into buildings or somehow turning the carbon in them into something that doesn't decompose and burying it.
For carbon-reduction purposes maybe not, but fracking does create its own problems.
It seems to me we could take a page out of Europe's VAT book which is ultimately paid by the consumer but tracks the "value added" throughout the supply chain from raw resources to finished goods.
Main problem with at-production is that not all consumptions are equal, and it puts the cost equally on all.
Once it's out of the ground, it's a matter of time before it ends up in the atmosphere, unless unusually careful sequestration measures are taken. Better to subsidize those, and tax generation, rather than try to micromanage the bit in between.
Also, if you try and individually tax the hundreds of thousands of different uses for carbon, according to how much carbon each thing uses, inevitably you'll get it wrong, and this will create inefficiencies and perverse incentives to do arbitrage between the various poorly calibrated taxes. What you want is for the market to figure it all out!
We know how bad one unit of "cigarette" is for our health, but we don't know how bad one unit of xxx is for the environment. An apple can have a co2 footprint of multiple tons of co2 or zero tons of co2. We can't know for sure.
Whereas if you tax at extraction this is automatically take into account at every step of the supply chain. The market does all the hard work for you.
The trouble is that this is a Hard Problem because a huge fraction of the world's carbon is extracted in or by countries whose geopolitical standing would be crushed by this. But unless we do this, the same amount of carbon will ultimately be extracted and subsequently burned by somebody.
(Also when push comes to shove nobody actually gives a shit about any of this, and any politician who deliberately does anything to raise fuel prices will find their head on a pike)